


The Worst of Me

by hajerika



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst and Humor, Angst and Romance, Bad Parenting, Beaches, Child Abandonment, Childhood Trauma, Drunken Flirting, F/M, Fights, Humor, Islands, Personal Growth, Romance, Sex, Smut, Weddings, bonding over being the only two bitter people at the party, people with shitty childhoods can always smell it on each other, rey shamelessly flirting with ben despite nobody else thinking it's a good idea, these two idiots physically fighting each other in public
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:01:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 45,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22649821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hajerika/pseuds/hajerika
Summary: Rey did not anticipate that she’d be having sex this weekend, but she really should have. It’s a wedding, her ex is here with his new girlfriend, and she’s a single woman in her twenties with low self-esteem.I mean, honestly, go figure.But if anyone had told her that it would be withBen Solo- her boss’s son, her ex’s worst enemy, and the bane of pretty much everybody’s existence - she would’ve laughed in their stupid face.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 181
Kudos: 695





	1. Where the f#@% have you been all my life?

Rey loves parties.

The food. The drinks. The lights. The music. The chorus of hearty conversation. The smiling faces, the twinkling jewellery. The warm-hued lighting and the chirruping laughter.

She never really had that growing up. Unless you count a sad group of orphans corralled around three-day-old sponge cake. The first real party she went to was in high school, where, after she’d nicked the most expensive-looking gift from the dining table, she found herself drunkenly giving her foster brother a very awkward, very unfinished handjob in the bathroom.

It’s still one of her fondest memories, despite the wave of cringe it invokes every. Single. Time.

So why is it that now, under much less sleazy circumstances, surrounded by friends and family, sipping at the finest wine, munching on the priciest hors d'oeuvres, and tapping a foot to the classiest live jazz, does she feel so…

“Lonely?”

Rey blinks away the contemplative glaze clouding her eyes.

There’s a man in front of her. Tan-skinned, elderly, dressed in the same sunny yellow as the frangipanis lining the walls. He’s got salt-and-pepper hair, a snazzy moustache, and a glossy, wooden cane that he leans against so suavely it’s more of an accessory than an aid.

“Maybe you just need a friend,” he says, and slides an open palm to her across the bar top. “Lando. Calrissian.”

It’s not hard to return his smile. She finds solace in the deep set of his wrinkles, and the aged droop of his eyes. He’s got that old-man quality about him that makes him so innately harmless.

“I know who you are.” She lends him her hand, which he graces with a chivalrous kiss to the knuckles. It’s sweet, and rather charming - an old custom from a mannerly age. “You’re one of the groomsmen.”

“Correct,” Lando drawls. “I know who you are too, Rey. Han speaks of you often.”

Her lips twitch downward when he makes no move to release her hand, and she has to take the initiative and return it to her champagne glass. 

Pretty awkward. But old people are just like that sometimes.

“Oh, really?” she says. “All good things, I hope?”

“Very good. I heard you’re a sweet girl.” He leans in, like they’re about to share in a conspiracy. Instinctively, she mirrors him. “And I heard about the stuff with ol’ Finny boy, too,” he adds in a whisper.

She can feel the smile melting from her face - a slow, creeping trickle like the condensation on her glass.

“Don’t worry about it, sweetheart,” he says, and again, her hand is suddenly in his. This time, he pats her knuckles with a wizened palm. “Breakups are always hard. Even harder when they find someone else.”

In his warmth, she reaps a morsel of comfort. It’s been a long, supremely shitty day. She may not feel much better about Finn, but at least she’s having a pleasant exchange with a friendly, old man, who took some time out of his night to come over and hearten her.

Perhaps the world isn’t such a dark place.

“They’re both here tonight, aren’t they?” he mutters, pulling a commiserating grimace.

She gives a muted laugh. “Yeah. I caught the flight over with them this morning, actually.”

It sucked. It was a three-seat row, and she was squished up against the window while Finn and Rose made lovey-dovey noises next to her for five hours. She couldn’t sleep _and_ she was too sheepish to climb over them to pee. It was the worst first-world experience she’d ever had.

“Well, that’s just a shame,” Lando tuts. “Tell you what.” He leans in, so suddenly that she withdraws a little. “Why don’t we go up there and try to make him a little jealous, huh?”

_Wait, what?_

A needle of paranoia weaves anxious threads into her skin. The part of her that still has faith in humanity clings to the hope that he’s just making one of those inappropriate old-man jokes - the type that you laugh off or pretend you didn’t hear. But then his fingers start to draw suggestive circles down her arm.

Oh God. He’s serious.

“Uh, aren’t you married?”

“Wh-? What?” He titters at the accusation, but provides no rebuttal. He is sheepish enough, at least, to stagger backward a step, his cane skidding impotently against the floorboards. “Where’d you hear that?”

Rey sighs. “Where’s your wife, Lando?”

“She’s-” A chastened laugh puffs out of him like smoke. “We’re not…living together, right now.”

Great. Of course this would happen to Rey. As if getting hit on by an eighty-year old wasn’t enough; he also had to be married.

She gives him an Irish goodbye before he can sputter out his next syllable. He stutters for a bit, wordless, staccato, like the air refuses to leave his lungs. But fortunately he doesn’t pursue her. 

And once again, she’s alone.

That back bar was her social refuge, far enough from the epicentre of the party for her to peacefully wallow in her own self-pity. Now that she’s roaming free, she feels suffocated by the droves of people crammed into this one room. Granted, it’s a big room, with tall walls, high ceilings, and gargantuan chandeliers, but for the first time in her life, Rey feels overwhelmed.

Grumpy, sulky, and scraggly teenage Rey, who had to invent a birthday for herself so that she had a designated date on which to cry herself to sleep every year, would be so upset with her right now. _Look at you_ , she’d say. _You’re in a room full of friends, on the biggest resort on Scarif Island, at the fanciest party you could have ever dreamed of, and you’re still not happy. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here, alone, fashioning a dildo out of a shoplifted cucumber and an expired condom._

Acquaintances flash her a grin and a wave as she passes by, but she doesn’t really pause for anyone. She only responds with a dead-eyed smile - one that fades as soon as she transcends peripheral vision.

All around her, she hears the individual notes of a party in full swing. She hears the rattle of the bass against the floorboards, and the screeching wail of a live saxophone. She hears the chirp of young people gushing over their food, and the rhythmic clink of utensil against plate. She hears the tinny pitch of old friends catching up, and the excitement in their voices as they reflect on old stories and exchange new ones.

Then she hears her name. “Rey!”

She spins around, her arms glued to her sides and her neck as straight as a board. She must look like a plank, awkwardly bobbing around in water.

Leia Organa - or is it Solo, now? - totters up to her with open arms. It’s like being hit by a train, with the force and speed at which the older woman crashes into her. Something that smells a little harder than wine wafts from her swollen, red lips.

Rey is rigid in her arms - not necessarily because she’s an unfeeling robot today, but because she’s being squeezed so tightly that she cannot move. “Hey, Leia.”

Leia pulls back. She’s hammered. Normally so elegant and refined, but tonight she’s got more than a few loose curls dangling down from an otherwise immaculate bun. Her eye makeup is halfway dribbled off from what are hopefully happy tears, and her lipstick is smeared all over her chin from presumably her soon-to-be-husband’s mouth.

 _Oh, Leia. I sure hope I look as young as you do at sixty_ , Rey muses. Judging from the current trajectory of her life, that probably won’t be the case. Sometimes, Rey looks in the mirror and already sees an old lady.

“Rey,” Leia says again, thickly and more huskily this time. “I am so glad that you’re here.”

Rey does try to give a genuine smile; she does. But it feels taut and strained.

“Oh, dear,” Leia breathes, running a slender hand down the side of her face. “Don’t worry about Finn.” She’s too drunk to notice Rey’s eyes marginally widening in a panicked _oh God_. “Everything will work itself out in the end. It always does.”

Rey supposes that’s true. Until life finds a way to fuck you in the ass again. It’s ups and downs, ups and downs, ups and downs, and then you die.

“I was devastated after my divorce,” Leia continues. “Especially when he started seeing other people. Oh! My heart almost exploded. But here I am now, getting married again in two days. You’ll find that one day, too.” She lobs another sloppy pat at her cheek. “You’re still so young. You’ll find yourself a nice boy. Well-behaved. Like you.”

Rey smiles through a wince.

Leia pinches Rey lightly on the chin with a click of her tongue. “You’re a good girl, Rey,” she says, and then hobbles away, looking barely cognizant.

Rey’s wince deepens. _Well-behaved. Good girl._

Two hands clap her on the shoulders while she’s still balking at the compliment.

She turns. It’s Poe.

“How you going there, sport?” he asks. He’s just a little less hammered than Leia, but hammered nonetheless. His dark, curly locks are a bird’s nest atop his head. His olive complexion is just the slightest shade pinker. Chest hair pokes out from his partially unbuttoned shirt.

“Just about as well as you think,” she says. “This party sure is-”

“Lit,” he says, flashing his canines. “I’m havin’ a blast. Why don’t you down a couple more champagnes and come join our crew over there?”

Rey angles her head to peer over his shoulder. Said crew currently consists of: Finn, chugging the remaining quarter of a champagne bottle that’s probably worth more than his entire month’s rent; Rose, cackling on his lap and tipping the bottle with one hand; Paige, side-eyeing her sister’s poor romantic choices; Jannah, yelling at her boyfriend on the phone with one finger plugged into her other ear; and Zorii, smooth-talking some poor, young fuckboy on the side despite the ear-splitting ruckus.

“I think I’m good,” Rey says. It wasn’t a hard decision.

“Come on, Rey,” Poe clucks, and slings an arm over her shoulder. “I know you’re uncomfortable. I get that. But there are plenty of fish in the sea. The best way for you to get over Finn is to get _under_ someone else.” He bends down, bringing her with him. “Who are you thinkin’, huh? I’ll be your wingman.”

She firmly but politely removes his arm from her neck. “You know what else there’s plenty of in the sea?”

He blinks at her with glassy eyes. “What?”

“Trash.”

His expression breaks into a good-humoured grin. “Ha!” He tosses his head back. “Suit yourself, Rey. The offer still stands.” He retreats to their table of friends.

She doesn’t know why she’s disappointed. She’s the one who keeps declining people’s offers to hang out or have extramarital affairs. There’s an empty seat next to Finn that’s meant to be hers. And she’s pretty sure that’s supposed to be her plate of cold salmon sitting on the table. It would not only be nice if she sat down with them; it would actually make sense. 

But her black kitten heels take her elsewhere. They click and clack to the furthest possible table in the room, all the way to the back with no-one but the waiters bustling in and out of the kitchen to keep her company.

She slumps into a chair with somebody’s suit jacket on it. There’s a half-empty bottle of Chardonnay to her right, and she grabs it. She sips at it, right from the bottle, because at this point, why bother anymore?

Even all the way from here, she can see her friends across the room, drinking, shouting, yucking it up, standing up all at once to migrate to the dance floor. She even picks up on the tender hand Finn brushes across Rose’s ass.

A bright flash of light momentarily blinds her. She blinks past it, startled, disoriented. When the burst of stars and colours in her eyes dissipates, she discerns a camera pointed right at her face.

She’s mortified. She must have looked so pathetic, sitting here, alone, the neck of a wine bottle clasped in one hand, glowering at the sight of her ex fondling his new girlfriend across the room. This person has managed to capture just about the lowest point in Rey’s reformed life.

The photographer drops the camera, revealing its wielder beneath.

Of course. Ben Solo. The bane of pretty much everybody’s existence.

He’s staring down at her with dark, lifeless eyes, as if he didn’t just overstep his boundaries and immediately land a place on her shitlist. His thick, raven hair is styled in a perfectly windswept douchebag bouffant, and his tie dangles loosely around his neck like a flaccid pendulum.

God, he’s never looked like more of a twat.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she demands.

He holds up the camera in demonstration. “My mom is forcing me to take photos.”

“Well, can you not take photos of sad girls drinking alone at empty tables?”

He has the audacity to argue. “This is the most interesting picture I’ve taken all night.”

Is this guy kidding? “Are you kidding? I am positive that your parents won’t want to see a photo of me pity-drinking myself to death when they’re flicking through the album later.”

“It’s not actually as sad as you think.”

The fact that this fucker is _still_ refusing to concede to her enrages her beyond belief. “Delete it. Now.”

He scowls, as if bemused by her very reasonable request, and glances down at the screen of his camera. “Nah, I like it.”

She can’t believe this. “Fucking. Delete it.”

There’s something on his face. She thinks it looks like a vague smile.

_Is he laughing at me?_

She leaps out of her seat with a noisy scrape of the chair legs. “Do you make it your sole mission in life to be hated by _everyone?_ ”

He’s definitely smiling now.

“Where are you going?” she snaps.

He’s walking away. She’s dumbfounded. Is she really going to have to chase him around the venue like they’re a couple of schoolchildren? “What’s your problem? Get the fuck back here! Delete it!” She pursues him across empty chairs and tables, and displeased waiters balancing precarious trays of champagne.

Mercifully, he stops at the back bar. There’s nobody bothering to man it anymore, since everyone has congregated to the front and champagne is being served like nobody’s business straight into people’s hands. Ben Solo chucks the camera onto the bar top with a careless thunk and hoists himself across it by the stomach.

Rey wastes no time in snatching the camera up, darting an unhappy glare at his flailing legs as he rummages for his liquor of choice. She scowls down at the photo he took of her, chiming beep after beep as she zooms in and out, in and out, in and out on it.

He re-emerges from behind the bar with a tequila bottle and a shot glass. “What do you think?”

She’s loath to admit it, but he was sort of right. It’s actually kind of nice, the way he framed and centred the photo. There’s an arch of decorative flowers on the wall behind her, haloing her head, and the empty champagne flutes on the table reflect a field of twinkly lights into the camera. Her expression, as sad as she’d felt while sporting it, appears more pensive than miserable. The bottle in her hand is only visible if you look for it.

Sure, it’s not as sad as she thought. But it’s still sad.

“I’m deleting it,” she says, and follows through with a few clicks and beeps.

He shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

The next photo whizzes onto the screen. She squints and taps the little _next_ button in quick succession, frowning at the strange things that this weirdo found noteworthy: a half-eaten plate, an unopened wine bottle, forks, knives, candles, the leaf of a decorative flower. “Why are ninety percent of these pictures of objects?”

“Hmmm." He fills the shot glass to the brim and flings it back into his throat. A reactive grimace, and then, “Maybe because I don’t give a shit.”

She’s still frowning when he retrieves the camera from her and snaps a photo of his own empty shot glass. “You don’t give a shit?” she echoes. “Your parents are getting remarried. To each other. Isn’t that every troubled child’s dream?”

He scoffs. “Maybe if they’re Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap.” He aims the camera down at his own shoe and photographs it. “You want one?”

“A picture of your foot? No thanks.”

He looks at her like _she’s_ the weirdo. “I mean a shot.”

“Oh.” She looks around, absorbing her surroundings.

The formal segment of the party seems to be winding down. Waiters are getting sparser by the minute. Across the vast hall, the dance floor is looking denser. The live band has departed, and the music sounds more bass-heavy. There’s an old guy, a few tables away, who’s either sleeping in his chair or dead.

“Sure. Why the fuck not?”

The top half of his body disappears behind the bar as he reaches for another glass.

Rey sighs as she waits. So this is where she finds herself. Drinking with Ben Solo, of all fucking people, at the sad end of a bitchin’ party. At least it’s a step up from sleeping with a married man.

“Are you married?” she blurts.

He returns with the glass in one hand and a grimace on his face. “What? No. Why?”

Yeah. Why? Why did she just ask him that?

“S-Sorry,” she stammers, breaking her voice twice across the one word. “I’m confusing you with someone else.”

“Right,” he says slowly. Thankfully he doesn’t press the subject as he fills up her shot glass and replenishes his own. “Cheers.”

Clink. Drink. Rey winces at the burning sensation. If it weren’t for the nice, warm, fuzzy feeling pooling in her chest, she wouldn’t understand the appeal behind drinking.

“You know, you’re not the saddest person I’ve taken a photo of tonight,” Ben says.

She turns to look at him, the action much more sluggish than she expected. The world spins for a split second when she stills her head.

He angles the camera screen to her and flicks through some more previews: a little girl, aged ten, dancing on her father’s feet; an elderly couple, heads bent together, beaming into the camera with toothless gums; Han and Leia in a loving embrace, hollering with laughter in a group of friends; Finn with _her_ friends, an arm encircling Rose’s waist, pointing and smiling at the smudge of icing on Poe’s nose.

Ouch. The last one really hurts.

“Why are you showing me this?” she asks, her consonants hardened by vitriol. “These people all look happy.”

“Yeah. They _look_ happy,” Ben says. “But they’re all just wretched inside. Which is the saddest thing of all. At least you _know_ you’re unhappy.”

Jesus Christ. Some miserable people make you feel better by comparison. Ben Solo is not one of those people.

“Sounds like something a sad person would say to make themselves feel better,” she says.

“I guarantee you they’re not happy.” He pauses on another photo of his parents. His father is carrying his mother, bridal-style, with a comical grimace of exertion on his face. “My parents weren’t happy then. They won’t be happy now.” He looks at her - ancient, jaded eyes on a youthful, chaotic face. “It’s all a farce.”

Sheesh. And Rey thought _she_ was the most bitter person here tonight.

“I like your parents,” she says. “I hope they are happy.”

He gives her a little smirk. “They sure like you.”

“They do?”

“Everyone fucking likes you.”

Despite herself, she feels smug. Rey doesn’t consider herself one to fish, but fuck it. “Does ‘everyone’ include you?”

He lifts his eyebrows at her. “I don’t really know you.”

It’s a non-answer, but its bluntness makes her smile. She likes blunt. Blunt is refreshing. “Don’t worry. There ain’t much to know.”

“I can hazard a guess,” he says. “Let’s see. You had a shit childhood?”

That’s a bit of an understatement. “Below average,” she answers cryptically.

“Yeah, me too,” he says. “It’s kind of like a radar. People with shit childhoods can always smell it on each other.”

_Excuse me?_

She wonders what he’s been smoking to even draw such a tenuous comparison, let alone voice it. When it comes to upbringing, she and Ben Solo couldn’t be more different.

Ben had three separate rooms for his games, his toys, and his TV growing up. Rey occupied the bottom half of one of four bunk beds in a cramped room of eight orphans. Ben’s first-ever car was a sports Maserati. Rey, to this day, has never owned a vehicle. Ben was gifted a house - yes, a full-blown _house_ \- by his parents for his twenty-first birthday. Rey doesn’t even remember her parents’ names.

Ben Solo, a shit childhood? _Don’t make me laugh_.

“Ha!” she scoffs. “Then mine must be broken. What the hell was so bad about yours?”

“Wow, fuck you, too.”

“I mean it. What, the little rich boy didn’t get enough attention from his daddy?”

Her little jab makes him laugh, which surprises her. She half-expected him to just tell her to fuck off. “Alright, if you think you can do better, then by all means.”

In the expectant silence that follows, she hesitates. She doesn’t normally disclose her childhood sob story to any smug asshole at a party, but she’s feeling a bit more generous today. “Well, if by ‘bad childhood’ you mean scrounging for food in Jakku dump sites until the age of eleven, then yeah, I guess you can say mine was bad.” She chews on her bottom lip, mulling over the next tidbit. “I nearly bit a man’s finger off when he threatened to report me for stealing bread.”

His laughter startles her. It’s almost crass in how blithe and lighthearted it is, but she’s more bemused by it than offended. “My God,” he cackles. “You’re feral.”

She’s taken aback.

He finds this...funny? Not sad? Not pitiful? Not off-putting?

Just funny?

Huh.

“Then what happened?” Ben prods, as if her answer will be interesting. As if he actually wants to hear it. As if she doesn’t have to defend herself - like she was prepared to do - because all he feels about it is intrigue.

“Nothing,” she replies lamely. “I just ran away.”

It sounds like an anticlimax to her, but somehow it makes him chuckle. “Like a gremlin, into the night." There’s a hint of something in the way he says that - maybe respect, or even affection.

“Nobody else knows that about me,” she says, monotone under a numb kind of realisation. “I mean, nobody really knows me, period. If they did, they wouldn’t like me.”

Honestly, she doesn’t know why she’s telling him all this. She’s never really gotten along with Ben Solo; hardly anyone has. Maybe it’s because he’s the only person she’s spoken to tonight who’s said anything to her of substance. Maybe it’s because it’s the first conversation she’s had where the other person hasn’t tried to lecture her on Finn. Maybe she’s just bored and lonely.

“That’s a pretty honest thing to admit,” is all he really says in response. She thinks it’s a compliment.

A commotion near the front stirs them from their chat. Somewhere on the dance floor, Rey’s group of friends are boisterously toasting to Han and Leia’s success. The happy couple join them in a hearty bout of uproarious laughter.

Ben sighs next to her. “Can you believe this shit? Only her. Only my mother would throw a wedding over three days on Scarif fucking Island. I mean, what is tonight even meant to be? A rehearsal for the rehearsal dinner?”

She glances at the giant LED lights up on stage, spelling out _Welcome to Scarif_ above the DJ’s head. “I think it’s a _Welcome to Scarif_ party.”

“It’s a fuckin’ waste of money is what it is,” he says. “So typical of my family. They’re compulsive squanderers.”

Rey feels predisposed to defend the Skywalkers, even if it’s to their own flesh and blood. After all, she owes her life to their generosity. “Well, the first two days are just close friends and family.”

“And there are two-hundred of them, apparently.” He throws back another tequila shot. He somehow managed to pour that one out without her noticing.

Probably because her gaze has been fixed on Finn. He’s noticed her, too, across the room. He twists around every now and then, faltering on the dance floor, probably scowling in disapproval at the company she’s chosen to keep.

Ben follows her gaze. “Are you trying to piss him off by hanging around me like this?”

A furrow settles between her eyebrows. “No,” she says, and is shocked that it’s an honest answer. “I’m not. You’re just the only person I can talk to tonight.”

So it’s true then. Ben Solo is the only friend she has at this party. How disturbing is that?

“I don’t blame you,” he says, already pouring out another shot. “It’s pretty humiliating, I gotta say, to hang out with your ex _and_ the chick he dumped you for. I wouldn’t have even come to this, honestly.”

“He didn’t dump me for Rose,” she says. “I dumped him first. Then he got with her.”

He drops the glass before it reaches his lips. “Then what the fuck do you have to be upset about?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Apparently that’s enough of a dampener on his curiosity. He chucks the tequila down his throat, and then rasps, “Fine, I won’t ask.”

Somewhere beneath all the layers of drunken haze, Rey appreciates that. Too often, people around her don’t know when to shut the fuck up.

“It’s not interesting, anyway,” he adds, which, against all rationality, offends her.

“Gee, alright.”

“Relationship stuff, I mean." His upper lip jerks on the word _relationship_. “Everybody has relationship problems. They’re like birthdays. Totally frivolous.”

She snorts. His nihilism is bizarrely endearing. “You are one cynical bastard.”

“Thank you." A small smirk dimples his profile. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

That was definitely a compliment.

She pulls a face at him, shifting a little at how much warmer his eyes look when he smiles. Which he has been doing a lot more of tonight. At her. “I’m not sure how I feel, getting that from you.”

That smile widens, almost imperceptibly. “What? You’re not used to me being nice?”

“No. No, I’m not. It’s very strange.” A light chuckle shoots out of her nose. “Even stranger than _Ben Solo_ being my only friend at a party.”

 _Argh_. She wishes she didn’t refer to him by his full name like that. Like he’s some sort of celebrity. That’ll surely pump more gas into his already overinflated ego.

“Well, what’s wrong with that?” he says.

“I mean, it’s sad. We’re like the two lonely freaks in the corner. Doesn’t it make you feel sad?”

“Standing next to a pretty girl? Nah, I feel fine about it.”

Rey blinks. Did he just call her pretty?

“Shit,” he tuts, reacting to a buzz on his smartwatch. “I think my mom wants me to do a speech tonight. Fuck that.”

She barely hears him, still reeling from the flattery.

 _Ben Solo thinks I’m pretty._ _Ben Solo. Me. Pretty._

Suddenly, she feels the urge to drink.

She snatches the tequila bottle from the counter. His eyes are on her, quizzical and shrewd, as she braces herself with two ragged breaths.

Then she tips her head back and swigs down five gulps.

“Jesus,” he hisses. He stops her with a hand before she totally wrecks herself.

She’s too drunk to fight, letting him seize the bottle back with minimal resistance. It’s still upside down when it leaves her lips, and a good portion of it sloshes down the front of her dress.

“Aw, fuck.” She reaches for the napkin holder to her right, but for some reason, her hand never catches it.

His voice sounds like it’s underwater. “Holy shit. You’re so fucked up.”

She is. Dammit. Why does booze always hit her like this? One minute she’s fine, the next she’s on the floor of a Taco Bell, crying about not really knowing her biological mother. There never seems to be an in-between.

Ben takes pity on her and nudges the napkin holder closer to her hand.

“Gotcha,” she hisses. Her fingers are numb. She’s not even sure how many napkins she manages to yank out, just that it feels like enough to mop up the mess. “Oh, fuck,” she hums, sloppily dabbing at her cleavage. “That’s gonna stain.” Blearily, she looks up at him.

“It’s...tequila,” he says, after a distracted beat. “It’s not gonna stain.”

His eyes. She caught them lingering. They didn’t snap back up in time. “How drunk are you?”

“What?” he laughs. “I don’t know. Could be drunker.”

“Even after, what, four shots?”

“Yeah.”

Her eyes roam his body like it’s a rolling, green hill. It would take a veritable amount to conquer that physique. “Yeah. Yeah, of course you could.”

“What?”

“You need to get on my level." She makes three attempts to grab the tequila bottle. When she does, she waves it in his face. “Down it.”

“Fuck off, I’m not downing that. There’s half a bottle left.”

“Down it!”

“No!”

Sometimes, Rey can look back on her life and pinpoint the exact moments she does or says something astronomically stupid. “Down it, and I’ll suck your dick.”

That was one of those moments.

Even drunk, she can see the way his face changes at that. The smirk on his lips vanishes, giving way to a slack jaw. His eyes darken from sparkling mirth to smouldering intrigue. “What?”

The last thing she should be doing is doubling down, but that’s exactly what she does. “I’ll blow you. If you down the rest of this bottle.”

 _What the fuck am I doing?_ Rey doesn’t notice the little voice inside her head, struggling to remain afloat above the tumultuous waves of bad-decision juice. But she does notice the man in front of her, tall and broad and muscular. She notices the bulge of his sinewy arms beneath the taut fabric of his black shirt, and the way she has to roll her head back to see his face - something she never had to do with Finn.

Her hand is suddenly on one of said arms. The other is trying to tilt the tequila bottle into his mouth.

“Nah, Rey,” he finally refuses, albeit in the most reluctant manner possible. “Stop.” He’s sending her mixed signals with his face, which is stretched into an ear-to-ear grin, and his body, which is leaning into hers and pulling her closer to it with one arm.

She’s tenacious all the same. Drunken giggles bubble out from her lips as she sways against him, her free hand somehow finding his shoulders, his chest, his face.

Her knees buckle under her until her whole weight is slumped in his arms.

“Rey!” he calls, with a different voice that sounds further away. “Rey, are you alright? Dude, get off her!”

Huh? Maybe he’s not the one talking.

“Hey, hey, hey!” he shouts, in a gripe. There. That sounds more like him. Deep. Husky. Always an edge of irritation.

Her head spins as she vaguely registers her body lurching backward and into another set of arms. _What the hell is happening?_

“Rey, Jesus, how much did you drink?”

Ah, she recognises it now. “Finn." She lolls her head back to look at him. Big brown eyes. Smooth ebony skin. Constantly studying her with an expression of concern.

It’s him, alright.

“What the hell did you do to her?” he snaps, accusingly, at Ben.

“The fuck? I didn’t do anything. She got all fucked up herself,” is Ben’s defence.

His voice. So deep. His words. So blunt. How has she never noticed how attractive that is?

“Rey, I’m taking you outside. Come on,” says Finn. He gently slings her arm over his shoulder and props her up.

When she lifts her head, she sees Ben’s eyes, dark and stormy and furious. “Come on, man, let her do what she wants.”

Finn levels a finger at him. “Stay away from her.”

This is too much. If she were sober, she’d be writhing in agony at the sheer cringe of it all. Now that she’s utterly smashed, all she can really do is…

Pass out.

* * *

The ocean is the first thing she hears. Then seagulls. Then the sound of Finn’s voice, softly calling her name.

She opens her eyes to his face, hovering over her. She still feels like shit, and her head is pounding like a motherfucker, but she’s regained some semblance of cognizance. She can feel a hard bench under her head and spine.

“Careful,” he says, when she makes to sit up. “Slowly.”

Yeah. She’s still drunk. Her head still spins. Her face is still numb. Her mind still wanders back to black hair and broad shoulders and rock-hard pecs.

A plastic cup of water is thrust into her hand. “Drink it,” she’s urged. She acquiesces, but begrudgingly.

“Hey,” she whispers, peering around. They’re outside now, just on the other side of the wall. It’s too dark to observe much, but she can make out the indistinct shadow of waves crashing into the shore nearby. “What happened?”

“I found you with Solo.” His voice drops an octave on the last word, as if it pains him to articulate it. “He got you really drunk. Must have been trying to get into your pants. Good thing I saved you.”

Rey’s temples throb with every misconception. “W-Wait…”

“Fucking scumbag, that guy. Preying on lonely girls like that.”

That’s it. “Oh, so you knew I was lonely, then?”

The unprecedented dose of venom catches him off-guard. He can only blink at her in surprise and utter a broken, “What?”

“You knew I was lonely and yet you still ignored me all night.”

He stutters for a moment, baffled. Finally, he yields with a hand in the air. “I don’t know what to tell you, Rey. You’ve been weird to me all night. And not just me, but all of us. We’ve asked you to join us, but you’ve only refused, so what are we meant to do? How does that make me the bad guy?”

She doesn’t know what she expected. He’ll never unearth the root of her fucked up problems. He didn’t get it while they were dating; he certainly won’t now. “Forget it,” she mumbles.

To her immense disappointment, he jumps at the window to move on. “Come on. Let’s get back inside. You can come dance with us. It’ll be a lot of fun. And I’ll make sure Solo doesn’t come near you again.”

Rey casts her eyes heavenward. She didn’t want to say it, but at this point she has to. “Ben wasn’t preying on me, or whatever. He didn’t make me drink that much. I did all that myself.”

“What?” It’s like the idea is unfathomable to Finn, the way he chokes out the one syllable in a squeak. “Why did you drink so much? You don’t even like alcohol.”

“Uh, I’m at a party,” she says, all sharp vowels and hard consonants.

“Yeah, but this isn’t you, Rey.”

“And who’s to dictate who that is? Me or you?”

In all her adrenaline, she hears the echo of Ben’s words, swirling against the rhythmic thrum of the waves. _Come on, man, let her do what she wants._

“And you know what?” she continues. “Ben Solo wasn’t ‘taking advantage’ of me. I _wanted_ to hang out with him.”

Finn’s nostrils flare at that. “No, you didn’t.”

Seriously?

“Yes! I did!” she barks.

“So, what, you’re going to sleep with him now?”

Oh, the bitterness. The jealousy. It oozes like thick blood from the wound in his voice. She laps it up like a starving vampire.

“What’s it to you if I do?” she goads. “Who are you to dictate who I choose to sleep with? You’re not my boyfriend anymore.”

“I’m still your friend." His eyes are wide and frenetic. “But if you sleep with Ben Solo, we’re through.”

He might as well have struck her directly across the cheek. It would have stung less.

“What?” she splutters.

“You know how much I fucking hate that guy,” Finn says, an impassioned growl rippling through the proclamation. “You know how he treated me. You know what he fucking did to my career.”

She can’t look at him anymore. She pouts to show her displeasure, and glowers down at her fingers.

“If you do _anything_ with that guy - if you so much as _kiss_ him on his _filthy_ mouth - not only will you be betraying me, you’ll be betraying yourself, too.”

A scoff escapes her. “Why?”

“Don’t you know how badly he treats women? He mows through them like weeds. You would just be another nameless _hole_ to him. He’s probably in there right now, already creeping on another woman.”

Rey bristles. What is happening here? She feels angry, and she’s too drunk to know precisely why. Is it the truth behind Finn’s words that are bothering her, or the fact that he’s saying them to her at all? “Fine,” she yields, mostly because she’s bored of this argument. “I won’t do anything with him.”

 _He’s probably right_ , admits the very quiet voice of reason in the back of her mind. She does recall Ben Solo’s reputation for breaking dumb hearts.

“Thank you,” Finn says. He’s quieter, now. Calmer. “I’m sorry I had to yell like that. I just… I really hate the guy.”

“Yeah,” Rey bleats. She feels dead again. Defeated. “I know.”

She can sense him examining the side of her face. His fingers tenderly weave into hers. “Come on. Let’s go have fun with our friends. The night isn’t over yet.”

She’s suddenly so tired. She kind of wishes it was.

* * *

It’s amazing how long a girl can go on complaining about her boyfriend when she’s pissed off enough at him. When it comes to Jannah, apparently there’s no limit.

She’s digging at her apple crumble, cold now that she’s spent the past hour screaming into the phone instead of eating it, as she bitches on, and on, and on to an only half-listening Rey. “And he doesn’t even acknowledge that it was his fault in the first place. He just tries to gaslight me. And it’s not until I apologise that he even _thinks_ about admitting fault. Can you believe that?”

 _Just dump him_ , Rey wants to say. _All you do is whinge_.

What is it with people and never having the courage to end shitty things?

She runs her gaze over the young woman in front of her. Jannah looks quite pretty tonight, all decked out in sparkling jewellery and skillful makeup and a sleek black dress. Her hair is still a wild, curly mane atop her head, but it frames her face nicely, and bounces with health and vigour. She would have no problem snagging a man if she were to toss her current piece of garbage. So what, then, is the goddamned hold-up?

Rey darts a glance at Finn. He’s sitting to her right, preoccupied by the back of Rose’s throat. Still too inebriated for diplomacy, she openly grimaces at the sight. This must be what a homophobe feels like watching a same-sex couple get married.

Jannah’s too self-absorbed at the moment to notice Rey’s disgust, or even that the other girl is hardly listening to her. “Has that ever happened to you? Where a boyfriend just refuses to let you win _one_ argument, no matter how petty?” Rey opens her mouth, but Jannah doesn’t wait for a response before continuing, “I mean, how big of an ego do you need to have?”

 _Oh God_. Is this what Finn had in mind when he dragged Rey back in here? What’s the point of trapping her at this table if he hasn’t even bothered to pay her the slightest mind?

A flash of black stirs her left periphery. Rey jerks at it, straightening her whole body from its fatigued crouch.

Ben Solo saunters into her field of vision, accompanied by his two very drunk parents. He’s so rugged. And big. And tall. They settle down into their seats, a couple of tables away, joining Leia’s brother, Luke Skywalker, and a few other old people Rey doesn’t recognise.

He glances over to her more than once as he takes his seat. Her heart flutters.

She perks up instantly, back straight and head upright. Her bottom lip finds its way between her front teeth. His presence makes her a better listener - at least on the surface - as she nods and smiles more emphatically at Jannah.

Her mind, however, is two tables away. She plays a game of cat-and-mouse with Ben’s eyes.

Jannah is none the wiser. “Don’t even get me started on the sex,” she babbles. “When he’s not in the mood, it’s completely off the table. But when I’m not in the mood, suddenly it’s me not finding him attractive anymore.”

“That is...so...annoying,” Rey murmurs, in the flattest of cadences. She toys with a tendril of hair between her fingers, chancing a hint of a smile at Ben.

Whatever his family are hollering at him right now, he’s putting no more effort into listening than Rey is. About a quarter of his attention is allocated to shooting them a half-assed smile each time one of them barks out his name or claps him on the arm. The rest of it goes into pinning Rey with a seductive gaze.

 _Doesn’t look like he’s with another girl to me_ , Rey observes, smugly, in an unspoken jab at Finn. Unless you count his mother.

She’s so engrossed in dark eyes, furtive smiles, and black wavy hair, that she’s startled by Jannah’s sudden exclamation. “Right?” the other girl shrills through a mouthful of crumble. “What’s with men and their sense of entitlement to sex?”

Rey feels an entitlement to sex. And it’s spurred by the man on the next table, watching her with an unbroken stare as he downs a glass of whiskey.

“Hey.”

She never thought she’d be so disappointed to hear that voice. Listlessly, she turns her head, and is met with cold, stony eyes and a hard, reproving mouth.

Oh, so _now_ Finn chooses to acknowledge her?

“What’s going on?” he asks - a loaded question.

“Nothing,” she returns, stubborn. “Jannah and I are just having a little heart-to-heart.”

The wrinkle between his eyebrows conveys he’s not convinced. He must have seen her, all this time, directing a barrage of fuck-eyes at his mortal enemy. “Oh yeah? What about?”

Rose is beside him, half-out of the conversational circle, clearly still sheepish about existing in any form of nearness to Rey. She’s frowning, too, but it looks like it’s more out of confusion than anything.

Rey takes it that Finn has chosen to keep her out of the loop.

She squares up to Finn’s provocation. “Sex,” she says. “And how bad men are at it.”

“Oh, no, actually, the sex is fantastic,” Jannah jumps in, because God forbid that her friends would think otherwise. “It’s just the conversation around it that sucks.”

Finn nods in absentminded courtesy, but his attention remains transfixed on Rey. He’s scrutinising her, she realises.

She’d rather not be surveilled. “D’you wanna dance, Jannah?”

Jannah’s spooning her last bite of crumble into her mouth as the invitation is extended to her. “Oh,” she mumbles, expelling a few crumbs in the process. “Yeah. Sure!”

Rey maintains a bold glare at Finn as she tugs Jannah by the hand to the dance floor. The two girls ease into an effortless sway, swinging their arms and rocking their hips to the lively rhythm. Rey’s head feels like it weighs a ton as she lolls it back and forth, but the dizzying sensation kind of feels good - almost like she’s floating through water.

Jannah’s voice somehow manages to pierce through the thundering music. “You ever get the feeling that your boyfriend hates your cat?”

Jeez Louise. She’s still going on about that guy?

Rey ignores the question as she rolls her body in tandem with the beat. She rests her forearms on either side of Jannah’s neck, shimmying her butt and bending low by the knees.

“Wait, do you have a boyfriend?” Jannah asks. Despite her insistence on frivolous conversation, she expertly reciprocates Rey’s dance moves in earnest.

“Nope, I broke up with Finn eight months ago,” Rey says. She’s too entranced by the rhythm and the remaining booze in her system to think of a way to put it nicely. “Been alone ever since.”

“Word!” Jannah yells back. “You and Finn dated?”

“Yup!” Rey swivels around to face the tables. Finn and Rose have disappeared and are nowhere to be seen. Ben Solo is still at his table, looking increasingly irritated by his family with each passing second. She flashes him a cheeky grin when she catches him looking at her.

“You’re better off being single!” Jannah calls over the music. “Trust me. A boyfriend is nothing more than a walking migraine. That’s what my mum always told me, and I was too stupid to listen.”

Her sentiment falls on deaf ears. Rey’s too busy concentrating on making her dance moves as promiscuous as possible.

One of her foster fathers took her into a strip club once. She draws upon that harrowing memory for inspiration.

Rey whips back around to redirect her moves on Jannah, using her as a human pole to sensually grind up against.

“Anyway, as I was saying,” Jannah says, oblivious to Rey’s stratagem, “I walked into my apartment the other day and called for my cat. Now, normally, she comes to me after about ten, maybe twenty minutes of me screaming her name. But this time, it took nearly thirty, and I had to find her under a rug.”

Rey eases her body down into a fully formed squat, and then undulates her way back up.

“And then I tried to feed her her favourite can of tuna, and she didn’t even finish it!” Jannah continues. “I think my boyfriend did something to her before he left for work that morning. I’m not saying she was scared, but she seemed like she hated me a little more than usual.”

A shake of the hips here, a little body-roll there. That should do the trick. Rey’s dress is tight and skimpy, the burgundy satin hugging her curves in all the right places. He’d have to be gay to resist.

She swings around. _Or absent._

His table is empty. Sometime during her most valiant endeavour to out-slut every other girl in the room, the sole reason for her efforts just got up and left.

Rey drops her arms in chagrin.

The crushing disappointment staggers her like a kick in the ass. What is she doing? What is the point to all of this? Her mind is too clear. She can feel again. The hideous reality check has done wonders in sobering her.

“I need a drink,” she says in a shout that is probably too loud in Jannah’s ear.

“Cool!” Jannah says, uninterrupted, unperturbed. She transitions into solo dancing without a grievance in the world.

Manners? What manners? Rey’s never heard of the stuff as she jostles through the crowd. She’s all hands and elbows and knees and feet. She really doesn’t care anymore. She just needs her fix.

The front bar is materially more crowded than the back, which is idiotic, considering the back is dead empty and totally unmanned. Rey would help herself to the assortment of free spirits, but she’d have to endure the entire walk that it would take to get there, and she’d rather not risk being alone with her sad thoughts. At least here they’re drowned out by deafening bass.

She squeezes herself to the front through some skinny girl’s legs and an old guy’s armpit. There must be fifty other people currently vying for the bartender’s attention, and Rey’s standing in a spot on the end of the bar that doesn’t look like it’s been tended to for much too long.

“I like your dress!”

Rey flinches at the high-pitched compliment shrieked into her ear. There’s a verified drunk girl standing next to her, beaming at her with smudged eyeliner and tangled red hair. “Thanks,” she replies, as stilted as it gets.

“I’ve been here twenty minutes and they still haven’t taken my order!” the girl shouts - with enthusiasm, for some reason.

_God, does she have to be so shrill?_

Rey can’t think of a response that isn’t a total dead end. She tosses up between _oh_ and _cool_ and _wow, no kidding?_

A hand on the shoulder saves her from needing to. She whirls face-first into a male chest, strong and broad and bursting under black cotton fabric.

Oh God. It’s him. He found her, somehow, amidst this giant mess.

Ben Solo’s got one hand on the bar and the other resting in his pocket. She’s said this once, she’ll say it again. He’s just so bloody _tall_. She has to take a step back just to see him smiling down at her.

“Hey!” she cries.

Yikes. And she thought that other girl was shrill.

He leans down to murmur into her ear. “You look like you’re having more fun.”

She grimaces at him and wiggles her head. “Nah. I’m getting sober. I need to replenish my supplies.” Her face grows hot from the sensation of his breath on her neck.

“You looked plenty fucked up out there,” he says, flicking his head toward the dance floor.

“Wow,” she laughs, shoving him with her hand. It’s an excuse to touch him. His bicep is super hard. “And there I was, thinking I was pulling out my best moves.”

“Nah, you looked like Bambi on coke.” He beams with unadulterated glee when she shoves at him again.

It’s funny how his whole demeanour has changed. He’s flirty and playful, instead of bitter and standoffish. It’s as if the idea of wooing her had never occurred to him before she so unceremoniously offered to-

Actually, let’s not relive that part.

He leans down again. This time, his lips brush against the shell of her ear. “There a reason why you’ve crammed yourself up here when I’ve already shown you where to get free liquor?”

She smirks at him when he pulls back, not really having an answer. “Is there a reason why _you’re_ here?” she says evasively. She searches his face as she awaits his response.

He doesn’t give her one either. He only flashes her a toothy grin, ducks his head, laughs. It’s bashful. It’s cute. There’s a flame of endearment inside her, and he’s fanning it out of control.

His fingers - large, long, dexterous - slip into the crevices between hers. A bolt of lightning shoots down her core.

“Come on. Let’s go to the back,” he says, and she nods, willing, compliant with anything he wants her to do tonight.

It must be unhealthy to succumb to someone this quickly.

She’s completely at his mercy as he leads her through the dance floor, linked by the hand as they weave in and out of the mob. She feels giddy with delight, traversing the party by his side like this. His hand is warm and his grip tight, pulsing her with the thrill of reciprocated lust.

Friends. Family. Colleagues. Lights. Fancy dessert platters free for the taking. Unopened wine bottles beckoning to her hand. She thinks she sees Maz, her adoptive guardian, gaping at her as they pass on by. She pays no mind to a single one of them. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t even want to drink anymore. She thinks she just wants to be alone with him.

Adrenaline overcomes her when they reach the back bar. She hoists herself onto it with the spring of her legs, but overshoots the mark by a sizeable margin. She topples backward a bit, hands scrabbling at him for balance. He curls an arm around her waist and steadies her by the lower back. The clumsy manoeuvre leaves them in dangerously close proximity.

She stabilises herself by grabbing fistfuls of his shirt. Her knees knock delicately against the sides of his ribs. “I saw you talking to your family. You didn’t look like you hated it.”

He sways under her grasp. Under better lighting, she realises just how drunk he is. “I did,” he says, speech all garbled and slurred. “All they do is fucking criticise me. And they do it in a way that I don’t realise they’re doing it until a few sentences later. Then it’s too late for me to defend myself.” He closes his eyes, briefly, when she rakes her fingers through his hair.

“What do they criticise you about?” she asks in a murmur. Her thumbs trace the shape of his hairline. So dark. So thick. So soft in her hands. She finds herself wondering what shampoo he uses.

“Everything. My attitude. My clothing. My temper. My career. How I’m always pessimistic.” She can feel his torso, subtly applying pressure, nudging her knees apart.

“I like pessimistic people." She combs her hands through his hair again. His eyes flutter open and shut under her touch. “And being pessimistic. It’s so much better than lying. People always lie.”

Is he really looking at her like she’s the answer to all his problems, or is she just super blitzed right now?

“You wanna know what’s worse than being lied to?” she yammers, because deep down, she’s flustered. “Being lied to with _pity_.”

His right cheek creases with a lopsided smirk.

“Which is all I got from anyone today." She brushes her knuckles down either side of his face. “Except you.”

His fingers tighten against her hips. “Where the fuck have you been all my life?”

Her gut does a somersault. Oh God, what is happening? Did he really just say that to her? Are they genuinely bonding, or are they both just really drunk? Somewhere beneath the heady daze, her sense of self-awareness is scrambling for an answer.

What would Sober Rey think? _I don’t know her_ , asserts Drunk Rey. She’d be horrified at the thought of Ben Solo’s abs resting between her thighs, but Drunk Rey can’t find it in herself to care.

“What else did you take photos of tonight?” she asks, grazing the tip of her pointer finger down his nose.

“Fuck all,” he says. He’s sneaking glances at her lips.

“You wanna take some more photos of me? I can be a very flexible model.”

She ignites a fire in his eyes. “I don’t know, are you going to delete them again?”

Her lips stretch into a sinful smile. “Not these ones.”

She sees his patience wearing thin, and hers does the same. Life’s too short to prolong the inevitable. As he leans his mouth into hers, her eyelids flicker shut, bracing for impact.

“Come on, kid,” she hears instead. She opens her eyes to the sight of Ben being lugged away by the collar.

“Hey!” Ben demurs, eyes wide and furious, hair all mussed-up by her fingers. “Chewie, what the hell?”

Han’s best man is the brazen cockblocker. He’s seven feet tall, burly, Russian, and the only other person in this room who can physically square up to Ben. “It is time for speech,” he states in characteristic monotone.

“Speech?” Ben echoes. “I told my mom I don’t want to do a speech!”

“You will have to do three,” Chewie says. “One for tonight, one for rehearsal dinner, and one for wedding.”

What the fuck? What flawless timing, Chewie. Rey’s not sure if she’s disappointed or relieved. It could be a combination of both, along with frustrated and horny.

She clambers off the bar with a few awkward kicks, her dress riding all the way up to her butt on the way down. Thankfully nobody is around to bear witness.

As she chases the two of them down the length of the hall, she notices that the music has quietened to soft jazz. The stage is vacant and well-illuminated at the ready, and everyone has congregated to the front of the dance floor.

Ben is ushered, very much against his will, to the base of the stage, where his spirited father entraps him with an arm over his shoulders. Together, father and son stagger up on-stage - father beaming with euphoria and son hunching with embarrassment. 

Rey does her best to shove her way to the front, determined to not let herself get lost in the crowd. Han is murmuring into a microphone, testing it _one, two, three_ , as she finally settles into a decent spot.

Ben looks quite unhappy, being publicly manhandled like this. But then he spots Rey, grinning at him in the audience. He smiles.

“Evening! Everyone,” Han slurs, so loudly that a light squeak of feedback tears through the speakers. “Thank you...so... _sooo_ much...for coming.”

Wow. Rey’s seen Han drunk before - Friday night drinks are an office tradition the man takes very seriously - but she’s never seen him this drunk.

“My son, here,” he says, ruffling a hand through Ben’s already disheveled hair, “would like to say a few words-”

“No, I don’t,” Ben intervenes.

Rey laughs a little louder than everyone else at that.

_Reel it in, woman, damn._

Han goes on, unfazed. “-of gratitude to everyone here tonight.” He retracts his arm and slams the mic against Ben’s chest, where it collides with an amplified thump.

“Uh,” Ben coughs, adorably tipsy and shy. He rubs a hand down the side of his face, as if to shield himself from the scrutiny of the crowd. “Yeah, uh, like he said, thanks for coming tonight. I really, uh…”

Rey has to bite her lip looking at him. He’s so freaking cute, the way he bows his head and grins at his staggering feet. He can only maintain eye contact with the audience for about half a second before dropping his gaze back down to his toes.

“I’m really glad my parents are getting back together,” he babbles, and Rey snorts because she knows that’s a lie. “I feel like Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap.”

The volume of Rey’s laughter is in keeping with the crowd this time. She meets his eye, glinting with the mirth of their private joke.

“Uh,” he says, after staring at her dumbly for a couple beats too long, “what else?”

Rey feels quite content to just stand here, swaying on her own two feet, watching the man she’d like to climb like a tree make an ass of himself on-stage. She’s quite content to imagine they’re the only two people on Earth, and to do nothing else but revel in the warm, fuzzy feeling he gives her that no amount of alcohol could replicate. She’s quite content with the idea that tomorrow doesn’t exist, and that there’s no need for questions like: What’s going to happen in the morning? Will he chuck her away like garbage? Is she going to find him chatting up another girl in less than twenty-four hours?

Right now, all she wants to do is drown herself in him.

Unfortunately for her, life isn’t so simple.

It’s as if she senses the impending blockade that this ill-fated train is hurtling toward. She turns to her left, though she has no business suddenly looking that way, and the stupid grin on her face instantly crumbles to dust.

He’s all the way across the room, and barely visible past the sea of milling heads. But she spots him immediately.

Finn.

God. The way he’s looking at her. It’s as if he’s already given up, all cold eyes and taut mouth and locked jaw. All around him are their friends, cool and smiling and oblivious to the tension passing between them. It is at that moment that Rey is struck over the head with another steel baton of reality.

If she follows through with tonight, she’s not just going to lose Finn. She’s going to lose everyone.

The ringing in her ears dissolves as she tunes back into Ben’s voice. “And, uh...we’ll see you all tomorrow at the rehearsal dinner, I guess?”

Oh no. He’s wrapping up. When he does, it’ll be a blatant signal to the party to disperse, and everyone will start to clear out of the hall. He’ll probably drop the mic, hurry off-stage, and search for her in the crowd. Soon, he’ll find her, lace his fingers back through hers, and ask her to come up with him to his room.

And she’ll have to tell him no. Rey doesn’t think she has it in herself to tell him no.

So she hides. Like a goddamned coward. When he sets his mic down, earning a clap on the back from Han and lively applause from the crowd, Rey ducks her head and slinks into camouflage. She doesn’t look back - not once, not ever - as she darts her way to Finn and her friends. When she reaches them, they greet her with elated smiles and warm hugs, welcoming her back in as if she’d never left the circle.

It doesn’t feel like a victorious reunion. Even as Finn drapes an arm around her and she sinks into his familiar embrace, she feels like a guilty dog, crawling back to him with her tail between her legs.

They drift out of the room as one big group, laughing and shouting and jostling and loud. Rey doesn’t have to look back to confirm what she already knows.

Ben Solo knows he’s being ditched. He isn’t the type to readily hand out the benefit of the doubt. 

The door that she had flung so widely open to him tonight has been brutally, purposely, _undeniably_ slammed shut.

She really hates herself.


	2. Some kind of psychopath

Rey’s not as resilient as she used to be.

Her head throbs the next morning, a persistent reminder of the shittiness of her life choices. It plagues her with a rapid tempo of painful admonishment, beating _you’re an idiot, you’re an idiot, you’re an idiot_ into her temples.

She rolls out of bed and directly onto the floor. Her hair is a tangled nest over her eyes, and she gazes around through the mangled tufts.

The room is a mess. Which is a shame, because it’s a nice room. The bed is huge, there’s plenty of space. The balcony overlooks the beach. She thinks she remembers brushing her teeth last night in a roomy bathroom with heated tiles.

And yet she’s totally trashed it with the mounds of clothes she’s got spilling out from open bags.

Such a fitting metaphor for Rey’s life.

It’s day two of the Solo-Organa wedding party. Guests are allowed free rein of the island, with myriad complimentary activities at their disposal. The only rule is to be back by six for the rehearsal dinner - and to not die, Rey supposes. Finn pinged their group chat this morning to remind everyone that they had planned to go hiking. Rey typed out an irritable _arrrggghhh_ into the message bar, and then backspaced it before she could press send.

Rather than risk the FOMO, she decides to pick her ass up and join them. She enters the dining hall in a skimpy tank top and jean shorts. Probably not the most appropriate attire for a hike, but she’s too hot and too lazy to pick out anything else. The breakfast buffet beckons her with an intoxicating aroma of scrambled eggs, crispy bacon, and fresh coffee. An assortment of colourful fruits, splayed out across the full length of a bamboo table, makes her salivate. Teenage Rey would’ve considered this heaven.

She skims the room for her friends, mindful to not linger on any glimpses of dark shoulder-length hair. Finn signals to her with the hand that’s not resting on the back of Rose’s chair, and she trudges over in acquiescence to his call.

“Oh good, you’re here,” Poe says through a mouthful of toast. “Help us finish all this. We got way too much.”

Rey would take issue with being offered leftovers at a five-star breakfast buffet, but then she remembers how she used to rifle through restaurant dumpsters for dinner when she was thirteen.

Rose hastens to her defence. “Don’t make her eat leftovers.”

“It’s fine,” Rey says, and shares a very awkward, very fleeting look of acknowledgement with Rose.

It’s a shame, really. They used to be pretty close. Sometimes Rey thinks back to their Sunday morning trips to Whole Foods, where they would trot around the produce section and trade puns out of the fruits ( _I cherry-ish our friendship_ ) and vegetables ( _You’re a cuke-ie pie_ ) _._ It was so long ago that it feels like an alternate reality now.

“I’m not that hungry,” Rey mumbles.

That’s a lie. She’s been starving since she woke up. In actuality, she’s just terrified of bumping into a certain someone if she were to get up and fetch some food for herself. She shudders at the thought of the two of them unknowingly reaching for the eggs at the same time.

She examines a grape before plopping it into her mouth. It bursts under her teeth with rich, juicy flavour. _Best leftovers ever._ She munches happily as she tunes in to her friends’ lively banter.

Poe sneaks glances at Zorii to his left, who stubbornly ignores him as she bites down on guava. “So, how far’d you go with that twiggy blonde last night?”

She smirks, but says nothing.

“I didn’t know you were into androgynous boys,” he prods.

“My God, Poe, leave the poor woman alone, won’t you?” Paige tuts.

“I’m just sayin’, you know?” Poe exclaims. “She’s the one who said I wasn’t _man_ enough for her, so I kind of expected that to flow through.”

“I thought you said you were over it,” Finn says. He stifles a laugh against the back of Rose’s hand.

Poe shoots him a scowl and tosses a grape into his mouth. “I am over it.”

“So,” Rose says, in an attempt to wrangle the conversation into something less awkward, “what’s the plan for today?”

“We’re gonna take a shuttle to the base of Mount Aurek,” Finn says. “Then we’ll climb it from there.”

“Actually, I’m gonna be hanging out with Solo today,” Poe says. “We’ll probably end up seeing you guys up there, but yeah.”

“ _Ben_ Solo?” Rey squeaks.

Well, that’s the most energy she’s exhibited all morning.

“No, his seventy-year-old father. Of course Ben Solo.” Poe snorts at her as she spaces out into deep thought. “He hit me up this morning. It’s been a while since we hung out. In fact, I think I’m gonna go look for him now. Since you assholes have all decided to gang up on me.”

Rey watches Finn’s reaction closely as Poe climbs out of his chair.

There barely is one. “Alright. Have fun,” he drones, not without the sarcasm.

Rey can’t help herself. “So _Poe’s_ allowed to hang out with Ben?”

Oops. She didn’t mean to sound so childish.

Finn looks at her with warning in his eyes. “It’s different,” he says, curt and sharp. “They’re lifelong family friends.”

Rey wishes that was enough for her, but it isn’t. She fumes, and she doesn’t bother to hide it.

Finn cruises right past the hiccup. “How’d you guys go last night?”

“I made it back alright - pretty early, like midnight,” Jannah says, picking at a bagel. She flicks a finger between Finn and Rose. “I didn’t see you guys, though.”

“Yeah, where _were_ you last night, Rose?” Paige asks, tipping her head at her younger sister.

“Paige, I’m twenty-three,” Rose snips back.

“Rose and I had to drop Rey back to her room,” Finn says - a half-assed cover. “You were, uh…” He directs a hearty laugh at Rey. “You were quite out of it. Let’s just say you weren’t feeling yourself.”

 _On the_ _contrary_ , Rey wants to argue, _I’d never felt more myself in my life_.

She bites her tongue, though.

A distant ruckus claims her attention. She can hear Poe’s voice, shouting something from somewhere across the room. Another voice responds with a rumbling laugh - a deeper, lower, huskier voice.

Rey gulps.

Ben looks different this morning. Maybe it’s the daylight. Maybe it’s the casual clothing. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s not drunk out of her mind. He looks...fresh. Like a potentially functioning member of society. He’s standing with Poe, in a dark-grey polo and cream-coloured shorts, at the ice cream station in the corner of the room. The two of them face the tables, grinning and chatting, as Poe heaps a spoonful of mango ice cream into a bowl.

Rey almost pukes her whole heart out when Ben’s gaze crosses hers. But then it glides right past her, as if he doesn’t see her. As if he doesn’t recognise her at all. As if she were nothing more to him than a stranger.

 _Yeah. That's about right_.

Finn breaks through her reverie. “Y’all ready to go?”

She blinks away her trance and chimes in with the chorus of _yeses_. This is probably for the best, she concedes. That guy is just bad news. If it weren’t for Finn, maybe she’d have woken up this morning with shame and regret and an even bigger headache to boot.

It doesn’t stop her from stealing glances at him, though, all the way to the exit.

* * *

“How you holding up?”

Rey is waiting with Paige and Zorii in the hotel lobby. The others have all run back to their rooms to grab a few things they missed. As Rey stands there with Finn’s backpack in her hand, Rose’s camera around her neck, and Jannah’s GoPro sticking out of her back pocket, she wonders what else that could possibly be.

They make small talk while they wait. Zorii doesn’t participate. Her demeanour toward them seems to fluctuate in line with her mood toward Poe, which, judging by the way she’s standing off to the side, ignoring their conversation and popping bubble gum, is not good at the moment.

“Uh,” Rey sighs. Yet again, she must fumble for an answer to that loaded question. She opts to evade it instead. “What do you mean?”

“You know,” Paige says, bobbing her head. “I know you’re feeling a little awkward around Rose and Finn.”

Dear Lord. Can she please escape every single one of these conversations in the future? Thank you.

“I mean, I’m uncomfortable with it, too,” Paige says, apparently without need for an answer. “Not to the extent that you must be, obviously, but she’s my baby sister. And Finn is such a scumbag. No offence.”

Rey’s too dead inside to take offence. “None taken.”

Paige is the archetypal protective big sister. If Rose were dating Jesus himself, she’d find a way to hate it. “I mean, am I the only one who feels like spewing every time I see them kiss?”

Well. She’s not alone there.

“Ladies!” Poe’s voice sends a shockwave down Rey’s spine. He moseys into their line of sight, a cute, smiley blonde at least ten years his junior clinging onto his arm. “We’re about to head out for some affogatos down the street. Care to join us?”

Rey follows the trajectory of his arm as he sweeps it behind him, and lo and behold, there he is. Ben Solo. Just as she expected. Tall, broad, ignoring her. What she didn’t expect was the pretty, young thing on his own arm.

“I think we’re alright,” Paige scoffs, not even attempting to conceal her look of judgment.

Poe nods, and then directs a bold gaze at Zorii. “Zorii?”

She responds with a bubble and a pop.

He juts out his bottom lip. “Suit yourself.”

Rey watches for any sign of emotion from Ben, but it’s hard to tell behind those damned sunglasses. Regardless, he’s giving her nothing, standing there with no expression and his hands jammed into his pockets.

She could go with them. She could drop it all and join them right now. She could dump Finn’s bag, Rose’s camera, and Jannah’s GoPro at Paige’s feet, scurry across the lobby, and bump that little eighteen-year-old off Ben’s arm.

Or she can watch them walk away, all swagger and giggles, like the sad nerd watching her crush stride off with the popular kids.

“God, what a couple of douchebags. I feel for you, Zorii,” Paige says. “You know he’s only doing this to piss you off. They must have plucked those girls up fresh from the lobby.”

Finn was right. Rey hates to admit it, but he was right. She kicks herself for not seeing it sooner. 

That guy really does just mow ‘em down like weeds.

“Ready to go?” Finn calls from behind them.

Paige’s nose does a displeased wrinkle at the sight of him and her sister returning hand-in-hand. “Yup!” She loops her arm through Rose’s and snatches her away.

Finn just laughs. “Fine. I’ll just chill with you, Rey.” His smile falters when he notices how she’s looking at him - glistening eyes, a tender smile. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” she chokes, giving him a little pat, pat, pat on the arm. “Thank you.”

* * *

They get lost on the way there. It’s Finn’s fault, of course. He’s always the one volunteering to lead, but then ends up taking everyone ten miles in the wrong direction.

“I swear to God, it was the red shuttle,” he insists, mostly to Paige, who’s throwing a downright hissy fit at him.

“Did that shuttle look red to you?” she snaps, gesticulating with furious hands.

Rey sits, squinty-eyed, on the side of the road. She’s admiring the view, a breathtaking one-to-one reflection of the sun on a glassy lake. It’s one of the most beautiful things she’s ever seen. She could enjoy this for hours - minus her friends screaming at each other in the background.

Jannah’s voice, cool and deep, cuts through the high-pitched clamour. “Don’t worry guys, I’m on it." Her fingernails make clacking noises against the glass of her phone. “Poe told me that he and Ben were gonna hire a van today.”

The view disappears before Rey’s eyes. She stands.

“A van?” Paige repeats. “Why a van? Isn’t it just them and those two floozies?”

“Uh, I believe his exact words were-” Jannah peers down at the message. “-‘island fuckfest’.”

“Gross."

“Island fuckfest? What does that even mean?” Rose says. “Are they all gonna have an orgy in that van?”

Jannah’s the voice of reason today. “I think he’s just trying to get a rise out of Zorii.”

“I really don’t give a shit,” Zorii says, and it shows. She’s all folded arms and lolling neck and withering eye rolls.

“Either way, let’s get them to pick us up,” Jannah suggests. “Hopefully they’re still around town, enjoying their _affogatos_.” She brings her phone up to her ear.

Finn treads up to Rey. “Are you going to be okay?”

She gives him a smile. She’s not sure if it’s convincing. “Yeah. I’m over it.”

He nods, and squeezes her on the shoulder. “Trust me, I’m no happier about this than you are.”

Rey seriously doubts that.

Poe promises to arrive within twenty minutes, but it ends up being more like an hour. They can’t really complain - they’re being helped, after all - but it’s such typical Poe behaviour that they do it anyway. Paige, especially, is somewhat testy today, and grumbles about it for the remaining forty minutes.

A sleek black van that has no business being on this island pulls up on the side of the road. Poe pops his head out the driver’s side window and nudges his sunglasses down his nose. “You called?”

His friends are not impressed. Paige springs up from her squat in the grass and wrenches the back door open with an emphatic click. “Took your time.”

“Hey.” Poe scowls. “We’re going out of the way to help you here. You’re welcome.”

Rey can spot Ben in the front passenger seat. That means the two floozies are in the back.

“Alright, everyone, climb in,” Poe says.

Rey’s the last person to heave herself up into the van, her reluctance wearing her down. She ends up stuck with the only empty seat: the one right next to Ben’s floozy.

Great. She’s gonna have a blast.

“Seatbelts on!” Poe calls over his shoulder. The stereo blares to life with EDM as he peels out onto the road.

Rey glances around. There’s a USB port in front of every seat in the car. The perimeter of the ceiling is lined with faint blue LED lighting that pulses to the beat of the music. There’s a free bottle of sparkling water, Poe informs them, under each one of their seats.

God, this is the epitome of a douchebag car.

“What’s your name?”

Rey turns to regard the floozy by her side. She’s red-haired, petite, and as peppy as a teenager gets. “Rey.”

“I’m Cathy,” the other girl replies. A flash of recognition crosses her face. “Wait. I know you. I met you last night! At the party!”

Rey could not be less interested in reliving whatever moment she’s referring to. “Oh.”

“Yeah! I saw you at the bar, and I said I liked your dress.”

 _And then I ran into Ben. And then I ditched him in cold blood. And now he’s with you._ “Oh. Yeah. I think I remember.”

Yeah. She really didn’t want to relive it. Especially not with Ben sitting there, directly in front of them, every word between them at the complete mercy of his ears.

Her friends are fooling around in the back, caterwauling over some YouTube video on Finn’s phone. Ben and Poe are bickering over the GPS, the latter slapping the former’s hand away at every attempt to hijack it. And then there’s Rey, somewhere in the middle, stuck in conversational purgatory with...Cathy.

“So what college do you go to?” the girl asks.

Rey abstains from scoffing in her face. “I graduated two years ago,” she says. “But I went to Ahch-To.”

“Oh! That’s a great college! My stepmother went there.”

“It’s pretty good. That’s where I met Professor Skywalker.”

“Who’s that?”

“Um… Leia Organa’s twin brother. Ben’s uncle?” She waves a flimsy finger at the back of Ben’s head.

Cathy’s mouth forms a surprised _o_. “Shut up. Ben!” She reaches forward to smack him on the shoulder.

Rey thinks she sees him flinch. “What?” he says, barely turning his head.

“You didn’t tell me Leia’s your mother!”

Really? Then what _has_ he told her?

“Oh. Right,” he mutters. “It mustn’t have come up.”

Rey hates the way his voice still makes her chest warm.

“I didn’t finish college,” Cathy says, in a manner that indicates she’s proud of it. “I couldn’t really connect with it. I realised that my true passion is to make a more profound impact on people’s lives than what a doctor, or a lawyer, or a...banker can do.”

A doctor? Seriously? What can be more profound than literally saving people’s lives? _Sure, I’ll bite_. “And what is that?”

“I’m a party planner.”

Rey almost chokes on her sparkling water.

Cathy blathers on, oblivious. “That’s why I’m here, actually! Leia hired me and Katie - back there - to plan last night’s party. It went pretty well, don’t you think?”

Rey humours her with a stiff nod. “Yeah. Everyone seemed to have a lot of fun.” Hiding her grimace, she leans forward and tugs on the sleeve of Poe’s free arm. “Um...how long until we reach the mountain?”

“About two hours,” he says lightly, as if that isn’t horrible news. “Everybody okay with the music?”

Rey slumps back into her seat. _Yeah, just turn it way the fuck up so that I can’t hear this bitch talk_.

This is going to be a long day.

* * *

Cathy has taken quite a shining to Rey. For some reason.

She’s glued to her side the entire walk from the car to the base of the trail, blabbering mindless shit at her with minimal reciprocation. It was bad enough that, for two whole hours, Rey couldn’t peacefully sightsee the greenery of the island, or rest her head up against the window for a power nap, or join in with her friends as they belted out classic road trip anthems. Now it seems she can’t even bask in the breathtaking scenery of the rainforest - something that she, an orphaned desert rat from war-torn Jakku, had only ever dreamed of seeing - without somebody yapping incessantly in her ear.

Rey would feel a slight sense of satisfaction at the fact that Ben’s date is more enamoured with her than with him. But she would rather Cathy just stop talking.

As Paige lambastes Poe on his turbulent driving, which had made Rose slightly queasy on the windy road up, Finn strokes at his own chin and examines the map board. He’s already back to default mode, eager to shepherd his pack headlong into adventure. “Okay. So I think the quickest way to the top of the mountain would be-”

“Not so fast, there, fella,” Poe cuts him off, subduing him with a hand to the chest. “I think we’d better let someone else do the navigating from here.”

“Wha-? I-! Come on, guys!” Finn searches the rest of his friends’ faces, hunting for an ally. He comes up short. “Rose?”

Rose sucks in a sharp breath through her teeth. “Sweetie, I’m sorry.”

Finn tosses an arm into the air. “Even my own girlfriend.”

So Poe and Ben lead the way. They’re the oldest, so they take charge. “That’s how it works, right?” Poe asks, to no verbal affirmation from anyone, not even Ben.

Rey can’t seem to shake Cathy as they begin their ascent. The uphill journey feels so much more formidable with this chattering dingbat by her side. Each step is ten times heavier than it should be.

 _Gosh, Ben, put a leash on your pet_. 

It looks as though she’s stuck with her, too, as an inadvertent hiking buddy. Finn and Rose are up ahead, snapping cute selfies and perpetually linked by the hand. Zorii and Paige have formed a duo behind them, probably bonding over how annoying they’re finding everyone today. Jannah is trailing in last place, and Rey can already overhear her fighting with her boyfriend on the phone.

“I don’t want to talk about this right now!” she’s yelling. A pause, and then, “Because I’m on a hike with my friends!”

Ben and Poe are all the way at the front, engaged in some political discourse or another. Rey can make out the words _Libertarian_ and _fascist_ , so she’s assuming that’s what it’s about. Poe’s got one arm draped over his floozy - Katie, was it? - who is dead silent as the two men have it out.

Goddammit. Why couldn’t Ben have picked the quiet one?

A full hour drags by, and Cathy doesn’t come up for air once. Not even when the hike proves to be rather challenging, and they need to skip across wobbly boulders and scale lofty cliffs. A couple of the more rookie members of the group, like Rose and Katie, are made to crawl and stumble and lean their way through. But Cathy is, unfortunately, fit as a fiddle, and whizzes through each obstacle without even a hitch in her breath.

“I’ve never seen a stream that blue before,” she chirps. She treks along with quick, bouncy steps to keep up with Rey’s long, even strides. “Maybe the sea, but not a stream, or a river. Actually, I went to Finland once, and I think the water in this lake that we stopped at was that blue. I think it’s something to do with the iceberg that melts into it. Or was it more turquoise than blue? Or cyan? Wait, what’s cyan look like?”

Rey thought that maybe Jannah would get off the phone eventually, and that when she did, she could use her as a conversational getaway. After all, she’d rather listen to Jannah rant about her boyfriend than Cathy yammer on about the colour cyan. But Jannah is _still_ screaming into the mouthpiece, her pitch getting more and more hysterical by the minute. Rey thinks she’s in social hell.

“Ay!” Poe calls from the front. Rey’s never been more relieved to hear his voice. “Come take a look at this!”

He’s motioning toward something off-track, concealed by the thicket of the rainforest. Rey can’t see what it is, but a bubble of dread gurgles in the pit of her stomach. She’s always had a sixth sense for this kind of stuff. She knows it’s going to be something she doesn’t like.

This is all but confirmed when she and Cathy reach the little clearing in the ferns, where the rest of their group have congregated.

It’s a cave. Fucking hell. Rey hates caves.

“Wow, this looks sick!” Finn exclaims. His eyes are as wide as an owl’s. “Are we allowed to go in?”

Poe shrugs. “I don’t see any signs telling us otherwise.”

“I wonder if there are any bats in there,” Paige speculates. She smiles, possibly for the first time today. “I love bats.”

“Me too,” Zorii says.

_No, Zorii, even you?_

“It’s likely,” Rose says. “Bats are very prevalent in tropical climates.”

Jannah finally catches up. “Hold on. Shut up. Shut up!” she growls into the phone. She cups a hand over it. “What’s going on?”

“We found a cave,” Paige answers, pointing. “We’re gonna go inside.”

“Oooh! Wicked!” Jannah chimes in assent. “I hope we see a bat.”

“Me too! I was _just_ saying that!”

Jesus, what the fuck is with everyone and bats?

“So we doing this?” Poe asks, waving his arms at the entrance.

Rey follows the motion with her eyes. She’s struck with a flashback of her first school field trip, where she wandered off on her own to steal some berries and ended up plunging headfirst into a ten-foot-deep cavern. It took the teachers two hours to find her. There were so many animal corpses in there. She wet her pants.

“Oh, this is going to be so fun!” Cathy squeals, clapping her hands and bouncing on her toes. “Come on, Rey!”

Rey cringes. Trust Cathy to melt her icy fear into sweltering annoyance.

She traipses, very reluctantly, alongside the others as they commence their expedition into that godforsaken black hole. As she slowly nears its gaping maw, she darts her gaze around for any petty excuse to get out of this. Surely, there must be someone else here who doesn’t wanna do this. Surely, there’s at least _one_ other person who can stay back with her, so that she doesn’t have to wait alone, outside, in the middle of a secluded rainforest.

“You not coming, Ben?” Poe calls.

Rey almost trips over a vine.

Ben is slumped against a boulder just outside. “Nah,” he replies. “I don’t like caves.”

She pauses at the entrance. So there it is. Follow her friends into the cave and possibly die, or wait out here with only Ben to keep her company.

Cave it is.

She resumes her path. She feels like an idiot, being the only one in here creeping warily on her tip-toes, but each tap of her sole against the damp stone sounds deafening. The hollow din of her friends’ voices reverberating off these cold, deathly walls is more unnerving to her than reassuring. Though they’ve each got their phone torches suspended above their heads, the compounding darkness threatens to snuff them out with each advancing step.

Rey’s breathing quickens. _Cool it, woman_. _Come on. You can do this. Just ignore that shadow in the corner that looks like a toothless old lady_.

“Rey? Are you okay?”

It sounds like Jannah. Rey can’t confirm; she has her eyes cemented on the ground in front of her.

“Dude, are you sure you wanna do this? I think you should wait outside with Ben.”

“I’m fine,” she hisses through her teeth. “Totally fine. I’m just a bit...uh, cold.”

“What? It’s, like, so hot in here.”

“Really? I’m ch...chilly.”

“Rey, go back right now. You’re freaking out. Rey.”

“No, I’m fine.”

“I really think you should go outside.”

“Look, whoever you are, I swear to God, I’m totally-”

* * *

Rey trudges outside. She releases a deep breath, shaking, just grateful to be alive on God’s great, green Earth.

Ben is still standing there, slouched against the boulder. He eyes her inquisitively.

For a moment, all they do is stare at each other, neither showing any indication of speaking.

Rey’s the one who concedes. “I’m...claustrophobic." She’s still a little breathless from all the hyperventilating she did in there.

When he doesn’t respond, she scowls, displeased, and then marches over to the other side of the cave. She plops herself onto the ground and folds one leg over the other.

 _Ignore him_. _Just enjoy the scenery. It’s beautiful. It smells like fresh rain, the cicadas are singing, and everything is so green._

But she can’t. She can’t enjoy this. The tension is not only palpable, it’s almost as overwhelming as claustrophobia itself.

In the void of sound, she drums at her knees, huffs out a sigh, rustles her feet against the pebbly ground - anything to fill it. She squirms, both mentally and physically, at the weightiness of the silence. It feels like a thick shroud of smoke, polluting the air, suffocating her. She needs to break it with something, anything. Nothing could be worse than the unspoken friction between them right now.

“So, you got a thing for dumb, annoying redheads, or what?”

She was wrong. That was so much worse.

He turns a frown on her, jaw slack with bewilderment. “What?”

 _Nothing. Say it’s nothing. Take it back. Pretend you didn’t mean it_. “She’s cute, I’ll give you that.” _Oh God, what are you doing?_ “I didn’t know a huge rack was all it took for you.”

She’d rather be trapped in a cavern than where she is right now. What is she doing? What is she saying? Why does she sound so mortifyingly _jealous?_

He shakes his head at her like he’s wondering the same thing. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about _Cathy_ ,” she spits, growling on the last word. Why the fuck can’t she control a single thing that’s coming out of her mouth? “You really tear through ‘em quick, don’t you?”

There’s a deep, deep crinkle on his forehead. “Who?”

It’s her turn to be perplexed. “Cathy? That ditzy little redhead you had on your arm who won’t leave me alone?”

“Her?”

“Yeah, her!” she explodes. She’s super angry all of a sudden, and too emotional to figure out why. “Is she your new girlfriend, or something?”

Or to display a modicum of rationality, it seems.

“I literally don’t know Cathy,” Ben splutters. “I didn’t even know her _name_ was Cathy. I thought it was Katie.”

Rey gapes at him. “No, the blonde girl is Katie.”

“Yeah, see, for some reason I thought that one’s name was Abigail.”

He must be fucking kidding. Rey thinks she has whiplash. “Wow. You really do treat women horribly, don’t you?”

“What?”

“You have a reputation for womanising.”

“Founded on what? All I’ve done is let that girl grab my arm.”

God. Those eyes. That mouth. He’s _seething_.

As pure heat throbs through her veins, Rey is forced to admit something to herself that she’s been denying since her first waking second of the day. It wasn’t just the party. It wasn’t just the booze. Even now, sober as a judge, she is inexorably drawn to him - to the fiery darkness of his eyes, the powerful width of his torso, the raw masculine energy that exudes from merely the way he stands.

She wants him. So badly.

How did this happen to her? He was never really special to her. They were never really friends. And she doesn’t really know him - not personally, anyway. She only knows _of_ him, from the countless anecdotes relayed to her by Han during his most emotionally vulnerable Friday nights, by Finn during his agonising stint as a First Order intern, by Luke during their midnight tutoring sessions at his favourite nook in the law library. She even hated him a little bit. And yet, after last night, every cell in her body is yearning for him, as if it craves him. As if it needs him. As if she does know him.

“So, what, you were trying to make me jealous?” The presumption is narcissistic, but genuine. Her cheeks flush with heat as soon as the words leave her mouth.

He straight up laughs at her. “What? No. I wasn’t trying to do anything. _Dameron_ was trying to make that grumpy chick jealous. I just wanted to hang out with him.”

She stands, her head spinning. “Why?”

“Because the dude still owes me eight hundred dollars from a poker game I had to spot him for three years ago. I wanted to bring him somewhere nice so that he would be in a good mood when I asked for it back.” He rakes his fingers through his hair. “I guess _that_ didn’t work out.”

Rey is baffled. Is he serious? Is that really what this was all about? The man has spurred a lifetime’s worth of burning questions in her mind all day: Did she make the right decision? Was ditching him a mistake? Does he care at all that she did it? Does he actually hate her guts? Why is he hanging out with Poe? Is it to get closer to her? Is he standing with another girl to make her jealous, or is he really just a two-timing scumbag?

And at the end of it all, behind every searing lash of curiosity against her skull, the answer is simply that...he wants eight hundred dollars back from Poe?

She’s getting fed up with the emotional rollercoaster she didn’t pay for. “You are just... _so frustrating!_ ”

He looks at her like she just slapped him across the face. “ _I’m_ frustrating? What about you, huh? What the fuck happened last night?” So now he brings it up. “Why the fuck did you just ditch me like that?”

She closes up like a clam. “That’s really none of your business.”

“ _What?_ Are you _kidding_ me?” His eyes are bulging. “You can’t just lead someone on for most of the night and then leave them high and dry with no explanation! It’s unconscionable!”

She opens her mouth, closes it. The explanation never comes. “I have my reasons," she mumbles.

He gawks at her for a moment, stumped. “Oh my God, you really are just a fucking _tease,_ aren’t you?”

There’s so much animosity in his voice. It feels like being roared at by a lion. She recoils, ever so slightly.

“I bet that’s what you did to Finn, too,” he fumes. “You strung him along for a while, and then you dumped him for no goddamned reason, and now that he’s got someone new, you’re prancing around, acting like a wounded puppy because you’re not the centre of everyone’s universe anymore.”

Did he just say that to her, or did he punch her square in the face? She can’t tell the difference, because each one would be equally as painful as the other.

As her stunned silence lengthens, she realises that she doesn’t know how to respond. How do you tell someone in a non-pathetic way that they’ve stung you beyond repair?

Luckily, she doesn’t need to. The distant echo of her friends’ voices, already returning from their short-lived voyage, affords her the excuse to stay silent.

Whatever’s going on, it sounds hectic. Half of them sound frantic, the other half pissed off. Rey and Ben stand in waiting, glowering at each other like the other person is just the worst.

Katie is the first to emerge. She looks mildly perturbed. “Your friend got hurt,” she intones.

“Which one?” Rey asks.

“Poe.” Katie’s gait is nonchalant as she carries on in her path. It’s as if all it took was Poe injuring himself for her to lose all semblance of interest in him.

“Oh God, it hurts.” Poe appears at the entrance, supported on both sides by Finn and Zorii. He’s got dirt smudged all over his face and is hobbling on one leg.

Fucking hell. Nothing good ever comes from caves.

“What happened?” Rey exclaims, shrill with concern.

“You been out here the whole time?” Finn asks.

_Wow, thanks for noticing, Finn._

“Genius here tried to climb a bunch of rocks because he wanted to get a top-down group selfie,” he proceeds through a groan. “I think he sprained his ankle.”

“I wanted to test the night mode,” Poe says, wincing and breathless. “I thought I could do it.”

“Poe, you idiot,” Rey says.

“You fucking idiot,” Ben concurs.

Zorii is livid. “You could’ve gotten yourself killed. Your head was _this_ close to a rock when you fell.” There’s a tinge of genuine hurt to her voice.

Poe leaps on it right away. “Oh, you worried about me, sweetheart?”

She releases him in disgust. He topples onto his bad ankle.

“Ow, ow!” he cries.

Ben is quick to take Zorii’s place, though he doesn’t look happy about it. Finn, on Poe’s other side, appears even less so. There’s a brief moment of uncomfortable tension, in which the two are forced to acknowledge each other in physical coordination.

“Well, what do we do now?” Paige grumbles. She’s never seemed less impressed, and that’s saying something.

“Obviously, we can’t go on like this,” Finn says.

“Yes we can. We can just ditch him by this cave and come back for him later. If we remember.”

“Paige,” Rose tuts, a single syllable of reproach. “Finn’s right. It would be in poor taste for us to go on while Poe’s hurt. And besides, we need to take the van to drive him back for medical attention.”

“Fucking hell,” Paige complains. “I didn’t even see a single bat. Thanks a lot, dipshit.” Her feet make angry stomping noises against the pebbly floor as she storms back down to the trail.

In the lapse in conversation, Poe looks around. Pretty much everyone is disappointed in him. “Well, forgive me for wanting to take a nice selfie with my friends."

Retreading an hour’s worth of a moderately challenging hike is no simple task with an immobilised comrade. Climbing back down cliff walls and jagged boulders takes twice as long with Poe manoeuvring on solely his butt while Finn cradles his bum ankle. The group is much quieter this time, their spirits waned by the unwelcome disruption to their plans. Even bloody Cathy has the mind to stay silent. The trek feels all the longer without conversation to distract them.

Rey could take this rare window of peace and quiet to, at long last, appreciate the beauty of her surroundings. There are tall green trees, and bright blue butterflies, and pretty little songbirds all vying for her attention. But she’s too busy giving and receiving hot daggers of blistering hatred to and from Ben Solo to pay them even the slightest mind.

It gets to the point where it all starts to feel like purgatory before they finally break the forest wall. In a strange twist of fate, thunder rumbles in the distance on Rey’s first step onto asphalt. The first few droplets of rain begin to pepper their foreheads as the van creeps into view.

Poe is looking woozy. He’s slumped much more heavily against the two human pillars propping him up on each side. When he speaks, his consonants are slurred by fatigue. “Hey. It’s rainin’. Would ya look at that?”

Girls tend to hate rain, and this group of girls is no different. They squeal in alarm and dash across the remaining distance to the van, ducking their heads in a protective stance against the onslaught. Only Rey, who grew up learning to treasure rainfall, lags behind with the guys.

“Maybe it’s good that we came back,” Poe says. “This trip was worth it, huh, Rey?”

The bad thing about not rushing ahead with the girls is that Rey’s the only remaining target to Poe’s quest for validation. Ben and Finn, who’ve just spent the last however-long literally dragging him back down the mountain, are unlikely to give it to him.

“Uh,” Rey mutters. She says the first thing that comes to mind. “It’s exercise.”

That could not have been less helpful.

As Ben and Finn load a barely conscious Poe into the front passenger seat, Rey makes sure to clamber all the way to the back, far away from Cathy, and most importantly, Ben. The mere sight of him invokes a barrage of _I hate you, I hate you, I hate you_ in her mind, and she’d rather leave room for the peace to nap.

Finn squeezes into the middle seat between Rey and Rose. He’s panting with exhaustion, damp with rain.

“You alright?” Rose asks.

“Yeah,” he wheezes. “I’m just soaked.”

“Don’t worry.” She unzips her backpack and yanks out a fluffy beach towel with Bugs Bunny’s face on it. “I brought this.”

Rey can sense the adoration radiating off Finn in waves. “Babe, you always know what to bring.”

Flashback to the time on Ahch-To when Rey and Finn got into a screaming match in the middle of a thunderstorm because Rey forgot to bring their umbrella.

She’s even more bitter now.

“Everyone settle in,” Finn calls. “It’s an hour and a half back to the resort.”

Rey realises something as Ben peels out onto the highway. From where she’s sitting, she can see his eyes in the rear view mirror.

* * *

The weather has really taken a turn for the worse.

Back at the resort, torrential rainfall crashes down in a deafening cacophony of water against concrete. Even Rey admits it’s uncomfortable. She joins Rose and Jannah under the Bugs Bunny towel as they scramble for shelter through a minefield of puddles.

The group convene in the lobby, where, for a moment, they all stand, stone-faced, watching the calamity unfold outside. Chaotic zigzags of lightning tear across the sky and visibly bifurcate toward the horizon. Rey’s never seen anything like it, and by the looks on many of her friends’ faces, neither have most of them.

Poe is the first to speak. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah,” Finn breathes. “Holy shit.” Dazedly, he adjusts himself under Poe’s weight.

“Isn’t the rehearsal dinner being held outside?” Jannah says.

“They’ve still got a few hours,” Rose says. “Besides, I read that Scarif has very volatile weather. It could be all blue skies and shining sun within the next twenty minutes. Storms here don’t usually last long.”

Finn smirks at her. “You are so smart,” he says, using his free hand to ruffle her by the hair.

Ben, who’s supporting Poe’s other side, flicks his eyes toward Rey. There’s a sick, sadistic glint of humour in them.

Rey bristles.

“The beach is ruined, though,” Paige grouses. “Who wants to roll around in sludgy sand?”

“Yeah. What the hell do we do for the rest of the day?” asks Poe.

“ _You_ are going to get this ankle treated,” Finn says. When Poe opens his mouth to object, he adds, “Humour me.”

“I’m telling you, I feel fine,” Poe insists. “It doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

Ben momentarily withdraws his support. Poe howls in pain. “Yeah, you’re not fine,” Ben says.

“Come on. Let’s get you to first aid,” Finn huffs. He holds out a frigid hand to Ben. “I can take it from here.”

Ben hesitates for a second. He looks confused, then offended, then ultimately apathetic. “Fine,” he scoffs. In an act of petulance, he releases Poe without warning, eliciting another hiss of pain.

Finn seems irritated by Ben’s lack of grace, but is probably more glad to not have to breathe the same air as the guy anymore. He and Poe totter off together, clearly much worse off without the balance of Ben’s support.

Ben couldn’t give less of a shit. Upon being relieved of his duty, he makes a beeline for the exit and struts right out into the pouring rain. He doesn’t say a word of farewell to anyone.

“That guy…” Cathy murmurs. “He has issues.”

 _Gee, Cathy, that’s the smartest thing you’ve said all day_.

Rey doesn’t follow the rest of the conversation. In truth, she couldn’t care less what her friends plan to do next. The entirety of her focus is on Ben’s retreating back as she watches him stride onto the beach and disappear behind a couple of palm trees.

That’s it, she decides. She has to do this. She’ll go mad if she doesn’t.

She marches after him, jaw clenched and heart thumping, not concerned in the slightest about what it might look like.

* * *

Rose was right. It’s crazy, but the rain has subsided significantly.

It’s back to the level of intensity that Rey can feel comfortable in, where she can tilt her head back, close her eyes, and savour the sensation of fresh water trickling down her face. She’s reminded of rainy evenings on Takodana, and the shimmery green of Maz’s backyard, and dancing in circles through waist-high puddles. Pleasant memories, hitting her at this very unpleasant juncture as she flounces her way through boggy sand.

Ben didn’t go far. She spots him very soon after clearing the palm trees. He’s standing with his back to her at the brink of a downward slope that spills out onto the glistening shore. There isn’t another soul in sight, because no one else is idiotic enough to parade all the way out here in weather like this. His stance is wide, his shoulders squared. His hair is damp but not totally drenched.

He looks ridiculous, she thinks. What a drama queen, standing there with his hair and shirt billowing in the wind like some sort of brooding male love interest in a Victorian-era romance novel.

She can’t wait for an excuse to tackle him down that hill.

The roar of the waves lashing against the shore overpowers the racket of her lumbering up to him across the squelchy terrain. But when she materialises by his side, swinging into his peripheral vision with an irate flourish, he doesn’t appear to be surprised. It’s almost as if he’s been waiting for her.

For a moment, they just glare at each other, the unbridled wrath and vitriol rampant enough on their features to remain unspoken. The wind is whipping tendrils of Rey’s hair all over her face, and mentally, she notes just how ridiculously melodramatic this all must look. Suddenly, she can see herself, too - the female protagonist, confronting the brooding male love interest on a windy moor.

“You have no right to judge me.” Her voice is so guttural with malice that she hardly even recognises it. “You don’t know me. You don’t know where I come from or why I’m like this or why I do the things that I do. You have no idea. So don’t fucking judge me.”

She pauses there to gauge his response. It’s practically non-existent. All she gets from him is an enduring glare, eyes dark and scathing, mouth clamped shut. His simmering body language is both intimidating and arousing to her.

“Honestly? How dare you fucking assume those things about me?” She’s stammering a bit in line with her stuttering heartbeat. “You don’t know shit about what happened with me and Finn. You don’t know shit about anything. You just prance around, raining judgment down upon everyone to make yourself feel better about your own shitty life. You know, everybody knows about all the horrible shit you did at First Order. That’s why no one likes you. Not even your own parents!”

She really thought that last bit would’ve garnered some sort of reaction from him, but it doesn’t. Nothing on his face suggests a shift in emotion, which is holding steady at the same level of unbroken contempt. It’s odd, considering how explosive he’d been during their spat on the mountain.

Rey takes it as a challenge. “Stomping around and whinging at your parents’ wedding? Oh, that’s rich. That’s classic trust fund baby with Daddy issues if I ever saw one.” She pauses again to no response. “Yeah, Luke told me all about your shitty behaviour back in the day, and how he never truly believed that you could take over his course at Ahch-To. And you know what? He was right! Who the fuck, in their right mind, would trust you with that kind of responsibility? You’re arrogant, pretentious, unpleasant, and to reiterate, _nobody fucking likes you!_ Sure, maybe nobody knows the real me. Maybe nobody sees me for who I really am, and maybe that’s why I’m too afraid to take risks. Maybe that’s why I did what I did last night!”

Talk about word vomit. How did she end up being the one to explain herself to him? If she were to stop there, that might constitute an apology.

So she doesn’t. “But at least I am liked! At least I have friends! At least somebody gives a shit about me, even if it’s only secondary.” A lump lodges itself in her throat at that, leaving the proclamation to taper off into a lame whimper.

Oh God, she hates the way she sounds right now. But she has to let it out. He’s still not reacting to a single thing she’s saying, and it’s riling her up even more.

“Nobody has ever looked up, seen you coming, and thought, ‘Oh hey, Ben’s here.’ It’s more like, ‘Shit, he’s here, somebody stab me in the neck so I don’t have to talk to him.’ I mean, look at you! Even your fucking hair is douchey. How much product do you slather up in there? It’s disgusting.” 

She’s just blindly lobbing shit at the wall now and hoping something sticks. She’s felt his hair, run her own fingers through it. She knows there’s minimal product in there.

“So why don’t you do me a favour - do us _all_ a favour - and kindly shut up, get lost, and _fuck off?_ ”

Her chest heaves in the aftermath of her tirade. For a long while, all she does is breathe.

And he…doesn’t say a word in response. He doesn’t shake his head, doesn’t lower his eyebrows, doesn’t so much as twitch a facial muscle at her. He just stands there, silent, drilling her into the sand with his gaze, towering over her with his overwhelming build.

It must be some sort of power play. Surely, he must be the tiniest bit bothered by all this. It can’t just be her out here, raging and livid and dizzied by the clash of revulsion and lust.

Because if it is, then...well, this certainly did not go the way she planned. In her mind, she saw herself haranguing him into submission by the sheer power of her words, compelling him to collapse at her feet and beg her for forgiveness. In reality, she’s done nothing more than make loud noises next to him for a few good minutes.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” she demands, when it all becomes too much.

At long last, he speaks. “Sorry.”

She almost recoils in surprise. _Sorry?_

He reaches both hands up to the sides of his head. When he brings them back down, there are two Bluetooth earphones pinched between his fingers.

Black. Perfectly camouflaged by his hair. The modern-day equivalent of earplugs.

“Were you saying something?” he says, as nonchalantly as someone who _isn’t_ about to be attacked.

Rey can feel her left under eye twitching. She watches him stow the earphones away and plop them into his pocket at a slow, shit-eating pace.

 _Oh, this motherfucker._ This is all the excuse she needs.

She lunges at him, snarling like a vicious beast of the wild.

From the way he crumples like a piece of paper, he mustn’t have anticipated this in the slightest. How could he have? She’s never shown this side of herself to anyone: Jakku Rey, who had to scavenge the ruins of her war-torn hometown in the hopes that a grimy loaf of bread would sustain her for the next few days; Jakku Rey, who had to learn how to fight dirty to fend off thieves and sexual predators at the tender age of five; Jakku Rey, who can truthfully say that she’s stabbed a man for looking at her the wrong way.

Luckily for Ben, he’s getting more than just a little taste of that today.

The two of them tumble down the slope in an amalgamated ball of arms and legs. Clumps of wet sand are flung into the air as they kick and thrash against the force of gravity.

They separate at the base of the hill, where Rey recovers first. Her first thought is _great, there goes another hair tie_ as she wriggles the sand out of her hair, much in the same way that a dog would shake the water out of its fur. She wastes no further time in pinning him down.

“What are you doing?” he cries.

Her response is a borderline demonic growl. “I’m going to get those stupid earphones and _throw them into the sea!_ ”

“You’re crazy!” When she reaches for his pockets, he catches her by the wrists.

“Give them to me!”

Ben’s a big man, and strong. So he fights her off when it’s just a battle of muscle. He thrusts her off him with only his hands and his knees, and then flips over to shield himself with his weight.

“Give them to me!” she screams again. She climbs onto his back and wedges her fingers under his biceps. She yanks and yanks and yanks to no avail. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Oh, _again?_ ” he barks, a mirthless laugh. “What is wrong with _you?_ You ditch me and then get mad when you see me with someone else? What are you, some kind of psychopath?”

“You are always being cruel on purpose because you enjoy hurting people! _You’re_ the psychopath!”

“You’re crazy!”

“You’re evil!”

She hasn’t felt this liberated in such a long time. There’s something about this guy - this horrible, difficult, _infuriating_ man - that makes her want to undo all of the progress she’s made on overwriting the filthy junk rat she used to be all those years ago. Somehow, over the past two days, Ben Solo has single-handedly unleashed Jakku Rey from her cage.

She might as well go with it.

On nothing more than instinct, Rey bends down and sinks her teeth into Ben’s shoulder.

It works like a charm. He yelps in a combination of pain and dismay and then lurches over, sending her rolling across the sand.

She pounces at him again, but this time he has the foresight to dodge her. When she lands on her side, he skilfully knocks her onto her back and subdues her by the wrists.

“Fuck you!” she snarls, pushing out with her knees. He’s way too strong and heavy to be kicked off. She contemplates biting him again.

“For the love of God, just stop,” he breathes, like he knows what she’s thinking.

She writhes against his grip, but it’s unrelenting. It takes a few more failed attempts before she realises it’s no longer worth the effort. She halts mid-jerk, fists clenched and nostrils flaring.

In the quiet that follows, Rey allows herself a moment of self-awareness. God. Look at them. Like a couple of rabid animals. Rolling around in the sand, wounding each other with words and teeth. She’s sure she’s never read _this_ in a Victorian romance novel.

She looks up at him - at what she’s done to him - slowly releasing the crease between her eyebrows. The poor guy’s got sand smeared all over his face. It’s in his hair, too, now a tousled mess sticking up in every which way atop his head. His eyes are dark and wild, brimming with barely repressed mania, like he’s about to lose his mind and he couldn’t be less ready for it.

 _I’m horrible_ , she realises. _I’m a horrible, irrational, batshit crazy psycho_.

And yet…he’s still here. He’s still holding her down, still looking at her in that strange way she’s never seen before from anyone else.

He still hasn’t run away.

Suddenly, she feels terrible. There were so many ways she could have handled this - with a shred of dignity or grace, perhaps - and yet her instinct was to lash out at him in the worst way possible. As she gazes up at him - at this poor, innocent stranger who had the misfortune of getting caught in the collateral damage of her logic-starved emotional breakdown - she sees herself through his eyes, sees how utterly absurd her behaviour has been.

Above him, there’s a clearing sky, glimpses of cerulean blue peeking out from the apertures in the gloomy clouds. He’s searching her face, too, his irises rapidly skipping back and forth. His grasp on her wrists slackens, and he pulls back an inch, as if to remove himself, but not all the way.

It occurs to her then that it’s all so high school, liking someone but pretending you don’t for superficial social reasons. She knows this, but she still finds herself attempting to resist him.

His body is warm. She can feel how solid it is, pressed up against her so snugly like this. There’s pressure on her chest as it rises and falls against his. The intimate sensation triggers a flutter in her belly.

Oh, Lord. How did Rey allow this to happen? She might not have read about this in any Victorian novels, but she’s seen it in enough rom-com films.

Never fall down a hill with the person you’re attracted to. It can only lead to one thing.

Tentatively, she slides one of her hands out from under his loosened fingers and hovers it over the side of his face. His expression softens immediately, magically, the furrow between his eyebrows smoothing over and the storminess in his eyes melting away. It’s as if his hatred for her were nothing more than a mask - one that instantly dissolved at the touch of her fingertips.

He doesn’t really hate her. And she doesn’t hate him, either.

Fuck it.

She winds her fingers around the nape of his neck and wrenches him down to her. As soon as she gives him the green light, he dives right in for it.

He kisses her with the fervour of a thousand Scarif thunderstorms, his hands entangling themselves in her hair and his hips pinning her even harder into the sand. She thinks she hears him grunting, just a little bit, in the back of his throat, the titillating sound drawing out her own shameless moan. His lips are firm and full as he kisses her over and over and over again, as if she’ll disappear under them at any God-given second.

Kissing him feels like dancing in a rainstorm after months of drought. It feels like spinning in circles with your arms wide open and your tongue sticking out. It feels like leaping front-first into a murky puddle and squealing when it splashes into your face.

She’s been waiting so long.

But time is lost to her now that she’s found his lips. She has no grasp on how long they remain there, curling and scrabbling and writhing against each other. All she knows is that her body doesn’t want her to stop, ceaselessly reaching and keening for him like an insatiable beast.

It’s when she feels his tongue, grazing past the tip of hers, that she is startled back into some form of reality. Her eyelids flutter open, and she sees him on top of her, so hot and so intense and so passionate that she could sink into him right now and never resurface.

This is so dangerous.

Her palm flattens itself against his chest and pushes out.

He withdraws almost instantly, albeit reluctantly, the scowl returning to his features as quickly as it had left.

She scrambles out from under him and staggers out to shore. It’s only a few wobbly steps, but she needs to get away from him - from the heady pull of his lips and the hot rays of lust emanating from his body. She stands, blinking at the sea, arms hugging her own torso. The world reels when she’s standing still, and she can feel his gaze boring into her back.

It takes a while for her to gather her thoughts. She has to separate them, first, from the churning concoction of hot conflicting feelings swimming around in her mind. Everything that’s happened on this beach so far has been driven by raw instinct. Rey is determined to make her next move a conscious one.

When she spins back around, he’s still in the same spot she left him, one elbow dug into the sand and half-twisted onto his side. It’s like he hasn’t moved once since she barrelled away, too afraid that if he did, the moment would be over for good.

He looks about ten years younger as she marches back up to him, all shrunken and vulnerable and wide-eyed on the ground. She stands there for a moment, looming over him, puffing out a handful of shallow breaths. Then she whips out an open palm. “Give me your spare room key.”

He hesitates for only the fraction of a second it takes him to process the request, after which he fumbles for the card in his back pocket like his life depends on it. His hand is vaguely trembling as he holds it out to her, and she snatches it from him like it’s made of pure fire.

Slowly, she raises a finger. “Twenty minutes,” she says, shoving it into her pocket.

She’s absolutely terrified, and her voice is all shaky. But she said it. He heard her.

They both know where to go from here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus points for anyone who spotted the Friends reference


	3. Time to bring out the big guns

Ben can pinpoint three distinct times in his life when he was so excited he could hear his heartbeat in his ears.

The first was when he was eight, when his dad had perched him on his lap and let him steer the Millennium Falcon for the first time. It crashed headfirst into their garage door not two minutes later, and what followed was one of the worst fights between Han and Leia that Ben had ever been forced to witness.

The second was when he was twenty-three, when he had finally had enough, cursed out his Uncle Luke in the middle of an important client meeting, and stormed out of the building an unemployed man. Following that were six years at First Order, which turned out to be the most disastrous years of his entire career.

The third is now, at thirty-three, madly punching in a twenty-minute timer on his smartwatch to meet up with the feral girl of his dreams. They’ll be alone in his room, and, judging by the way she’d been kissing him only minutes earlier, likely to end up extremely naked.

Let’s see what catastrophic outcome crops up from this.

He sprints back to the resort. He doesn’t know where she went, but if she’s serious about this, he better be ready for her in his room as soon as humanly possible.

As he stumbles one too many times over his own two feet, he notes that Finn’s little girlfriend was spot on about the weather. The sun is already peeking out through the clouds, its luminous rays carved out by swaying palm trees. Resort staff file down to the beach like ants, making preparations for the wedding rehearsal in prompt response to the clearing weather.

Ben ducks behind a tree to scope out his options. From his vantage point, he can glimpse his Uncle Chewie transporting some wooden chairs onto the beach, and his Uncle Luke liaising with the celebrant. He’ll have to sneak around them if he wants to make it out of here unscathed. If he were spotted, he’d be obligated to help out, and he could kiss any chance of seeing Rey naked goodbye.

There’s a door on the side of the building that’s a lot quieter than the others. He’d noticed it when that bastard, Finn, had ushered Rey out of it last night. The path to it is obscured by a line of dwarf palm trees and a rack of neon-coloured surfboards. That will have to do.

With his type of build, it’s not easy to slink past unnoticed. He has not been blessed with a body for stealth. But somehow - by some miracle - he makes it, rounding the corner and flattening himself against the wall. He keeps his eyes trained on the direction of the shore, paranoid that his Uncle Luke or Uncle Chewie would spontaneously pop their heads around the corner and ensnare him with an afternoon of asinine wedding duties. Slowly, he inches, inches, inches toward the door, one arm outstretched behind him, until-

“Heya, kid!”

Ben jerks around. His Uncle Lando is beaming up at him.

Fuck.

* * *

Rey can hear her own heartbeat. Is that normal? It’s thumping like a drum in her ears as she speed-walks through the lobby.

Goddammit. She really should’ve given herself longer than twenty minutes. She doesn’t know why that was the magic number that tumbled out of her mouth, but right now, with blessed hindsight, she realises she needs so much more than that to clean up this mess.

She stares at herself in the decorative mirror on the wall as she waits for an elevator. The words _rock_ and _bottom_ are the first to pop up in her mind. Her mascara is smudged, her clothes are muddy, her hair is unfastened and scruffy and sandy. She’s got some mild burns on her knees from their little tussle on the beach, and a sweaty sheen of dirt is coating her skin.

Oh God, she hopes no one sees her like this.

Right on cue, the elevator doors slide open to reveal the bride and groom themselves stepping out into the lobby. They’re squabbling over some wedding matter or another at full volume.

Rey whirls her back to them, resting a hand on her temple to shield her face.

“And what of it?” Han shouts. “If I want to let a couple fireworks loose at my wedding, why can’t I?”

“It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen!” Leia counters. “Need I remind you of the mayhem that ensued at your son’s twenty-first birthday soirée?”

Rey teeters on the delicate balance between dashing into the elevator before the doors roll closed and waiting long enough for Han and Leia to drift away so that they don’t see her.

She glances down at the time on her phone. Shit. It’s already been a few minutes. Who knows how much longer she’ll need to wait for another lift?

She can’t fuck this up. Not again. She makes a run for it.

“That was totally different!” Han exclaims. “That was in our tiny Hanna City backyard. This is an open ocean!”

“Ben didn’t talk to you for weeks after!” Leia retorts.

“Well, that was his…” Han pauses. “Rey?”

Rey almost trips over herself at the sound of her name. But she persists, bolting right through the elevator doors. They close behind her.

She exhales. Another glance at her phone tells her she’s got less than fifteen minutes.

* * *

Lando is drunk. What else is new? He’s got his touchy hands all over Ben’s torso as he slurs nonsense at him and wafts the stench of red wine into his face.

“And, you know, your mom hates the Falcon. _Hates_ it,” he blathers. “And yeah, I know your dad won her from me, fair and square, but I was thinkin’, you know, now that they’re back together, maybe their relationship needs a few compromises.”

Ben peeks at his smartwatch. Great. He’s wasted over five minutes indulging this old drunk. Ben remembers a time when he thought his Uncle Lando was the coolest, suavest dude to ever grace the galaxy. Now, all he wants to do is get the fuck away from him.

Lando closes a hand over Ben’s shoulder and levels a finger at him with the other. “Maybe you can talk him into handing her back to me - over another friendly game of poker, if need be. He’ll listen to you, kid. Your old man, he respects you a great deal.”

“You’re drunk, Lando,” Ben says. “How about you go sit by the pool? It’s getting sunny. Maybe you can take a nap.”

Ben can see the idea being physically processed across the old man’s features. An easy smile sweeps over his leathery face. “Nap,” he echoes, light and airy. “Yeah. That sounds nice. I think I’ll do that.”

“Great. There you go.” Ben watches as he meanders off in the complete opposite direction to where the pool should be.

_Eh, he’ll find his way._

Ben barges through the door.

* * *

The door to Rey’s room swings shut with a bang. There’s another bang as she slumps against it, and another as she flops her head back into it.

She allows herself one calming breath, a second calming breath, and a third calming breath; then she springs into action.

Her clothes are the first to go, soaring across the room and joining the existing junk heap on the floor. Boy, is she glad that her impulsive plan happens to take place in Ben’s room, not hers. A room that looks like a tornado just tore through it isn’t exactly a turn-on.

She squeals when the shower pummels ice-cold water onto her back. Soap bars and shampoo bottles go flying everywhere in her haste to douse the stuff all over her body. In all her frenzy, she smacks her elbow against the glass more than once.

 _Get it together, woman_. _The last thing you need right now is to lose your cool._

She reaches for her shaver, but her clumsy fingers knock it clean onto the shower floor. It disassembles at her feet like shattering glass.

“Shit!”

* * *

Ben peers around the corner before entering the lobby. As far as he can tell, the coast is clear.

There’s no time to be any more cautious.

He thrusts himself off the wall, his gaze darting about like a bank robber on coke. On quick and shallow steps, he rounds the corner to the elevators.

His parents are there to greet him.

He skids to an unstable halt, about three inches from ramming his mother right off her feet.

“Oh good, Ben, you’re here,” she says, totally unfazed. “We need your help with something.”

He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “I gotta take a dump.”

“It’ll only take two seconds,” she insists, looping an arm through his. “Come.”

“Bu- I-”

Fuck. He’s always found it impossible to say no to his mother. It’s a massive character defect of his.

He notices his father frowning at him as they all saunter off. The old man looks...suspicious.

“What?” Ben asks.

Han looks him up and down. “Why are you covered in sand?”

* * *

“Fuck!” Rey hisses. That’s the third time she’s cut herself on the leg.

She curses herself for not shaving sooner. She did not anticipate that she’d be having sex this weekend, but she really should have. It’s a wedding, and she’s a single woman in her twenties with low self-esteem.

_I mean, honestly, go figure._

She tosses the towel directly onto the floor when she’s done drying herself. The complimentary hotel comb gets caught in her hair when she attempts to wrangle it into some form of decency. She spritzes a hint of Victoria’s Secret body mist between her thighs.

Her phone buzzes loudly against the sink. It’s not unlike the sound of a jackhammer boring into concrete. The racket startles the toothbrush out of her hands.

On her way back up from retrieving it, she glances at the screen. It’s Finn. He’s calling her.

She ignores it.

* * *

“We’ve been through this before and we both agreed to have the ceremony outside!”

“Yeah, on wood, not sand! I never agreed to get married on a beach! I’ll get sand in my socks!”

“Well, if you didn’t want there to be sand, why did you suggest a Scarif wedding?”

“Because I thought you’d let me do the fireworks over open ocean! But it seems like I don’t even get that!”

Ben is sandwiched between his parents as they yell over him at each other and refuse to let him leave. It’s just like his high school graduation, only worse because he could be getting laid right now.

He massages his temples in stressful circles.

His Uncle Luke is there too, acting as mediator and rendering Ben’s presence utterly redundant. Uncle Chewie, on the other hand, is very wisely busying himself with the chairs, so as to cast a wide berth between himself and the drama.

“Well, what’s your issue with the fireworks, Leia?” Luke questions, an irritatingly measured expression of diplomacy on his face.

Leia’s eyes bulge. “Oh, we are _not_ going through the fireworks again. That ship has sailed.”

“I’m telling you, Ben is over the fireworks thing!” Han says. “Son, you’re not scared of fireworks anymore, are ya?”

“Oh my God, Dad, for the last time, I was never scared of fireworks! I was just pissed at you for firing one _directly_ into my back!” Ben shouts.

“Now, now, Ben,” Luke says, “there’s no shame in a man admitting weakness. It’s all healthy.”

“Oh, _spare me_ , Uncle.”

“Ben, what are you wearing to the rehearsal dinner tonight?” Leia asks. “Try the navy suit this time. I don’t think the charcoal one fit you very well. Your thighs looked like they wanted to burst right through the material.”

Is Ben in hell? “Is this all you called me out for? Because, if you don’t mind-”

“Oh, hold on, Ben. One more thing,” his mother clucks. She seizes him by the hand and leads him over to the bare skeleton of the wedding arch. “Now, sweetie, what do you think: pink or white?”

Ben sighs. _Somebody kill me_.

* * *

Rey gives herself one last once-over in the mirror before she leaves. She adjusts her left boob in its bra cup, just to plump her cleavage up a little, and fluffs out her hair. She’s wearing this cute, new sundress that she bought specifically to make Finn jealous. It’s light-blue, flowery, and shows the right amount of skin.

She can’t wait to get ploughed in it.

* * *

“And another thing,” Leia seethes, jabbing a manicured finger at Han’s chest, “you have been absolutely _no_ help at all in planning this wedding! I mean, look at us! We’re _still_ deciding on the wedding arch flowers! The ceremony is tomorrow!”

“I told you, honey, I have no opinions on the flowers, or the napkins, or the table shapes, or any of that stuff. So whatever you wanna do, you know, whatever makes you happy, I’m all for it!”

“How can you have no opinions on it whatsoever? Do you know how unhelpful that is? Do you not _care?_ ”

“Of course I care.”

“ _Then help me pick out the colours for the wedding arch!_ ”

“Oh my God, Mom, just go with the pink and yellow flowers!” Ben explodes. “They’re the best looking ones, alright? I promise.”

“Really? Not the white and yellow? It’s classic.”

Ben refrains from groaning in her face. You always need to work to prove to Leia that the problem has been solved. “No. The pink stands out more. And it’ll go with the bridesmaids dresses.”

Leia’s features, so turbulent with rage and concern, instantly soften. She pulls her son into a tender hug. “Oh, Ben, I knew I could count on you.”

Ben checks his watch over his mom’s shoulder. Only two minutes left.

“Now,” Leia sighs, “help me settle the fairy lights.”

Fuck. No.

* * *

There it is again, her heartbeat in her ears. Rey can hear it as she slides the room key into the card reader. She’s a little late, but she’s sure she’ll be forgiven.

If not, she has her ways of making it up to him.

She rearranges her face into a sultry smile and dips her head into her most flattering angle. With a preparatory breath, she nudges her way inside.

Her smile falters.

Oh. The room’s empty. Maybe he’s a bit late, too.

 _Or maybe he’s standing you up_ , cries the paranoid voice in Rey’s head.

She elects to ignore it, instead utilising the spare time to devise the perfect reveal. Should she wait for him out on the balcony, her hair and dress fluttering tantalisingly in the breeze? Should she emerge from the bathroom, skin glowing with slick humidity and rivulets of water trickling down her chest? Should she sprawl herself across the length of his bed, one leg stretched out and the other slightly bent to tease him with a peek of the lace panties under her skirt? She trials it all, racing from bed to balcony to bathroom to couch.

The voice in her head grows louder with each passing minute. _He’s playing you, you fool_. _He’s getting you back for blue-balling him last night_.

She keeps knocking it back, but each defending blow is weaker than the last. No, surely not. Surely, nobody’s that petty and cruel. Not even Ben Solo.

Despite the numerous case studies that have demonstrated otherwise.

He’s officially ten minutes late when she stops pacing. She’s out of energy, and on her last reserves of hope. She plants herself on the edge of his bed, heaving a long-suffering sigh through her mouth. For a while, all she does is look around, running her eyes across every inch of his room.

Whatever she is in terms of hotel room treatment, he’s the exact opposite. The place is freakishly tidy, with a designated spot for each and every item. His suitcase is wedged in the far corner of the room, closed and secured with a combination lock. His clothes are neatly hung in matching outfits on the wall, and his shoes arranged in perfect pairs by the door. The bathroom looks virtually uninhabited.

Jeez. Maybe he really is a psychopath.

She looks down at her phone. It’s almost three. He’ll be twenty minutes late. Twenty. By then, it will be double the elapsed time that she told him to take, and there’s no guarantee that he’ll even be here.

This is ridiculous. There’s no point to this anymore. The hope drains from her body, with only dread to fill the void.

He stood her up.

Rey forces down the lump in her throat as she rises to her feet. That asshole. That nasty, awful, _diabolical_ asshole. How could she let him do this to her? She thought she was smarter than this. She’s been through so much, outwitted so many, beaten countless horrible men at their own game.

And bloody _Ben Solo_ is the one to finally trump her? What kind of sick twist is that?

 _You deserve it_ , whispers the voice. _You got what was coming to you._

Her chest caves in at the thought. Because you know what? It’s right.

Why wouldn’t he do this to her? It would be satisfying as hell. If presented with the perfect opportunity for revenge, she’d be hard-pressed to resist it, too. After all, she did this to him first. She was nasty, awful, diabolical first. He has every right to teach her this lesson. She shouldn’t even be mad at him for it.

Doesn’t stop it from hurting like a bitch, though.

Her face is hot with rage, shame, humiliation, and rejection as she stomps her way to the door. She’s so inundated with flaming emotion - at him, at herself, at life in general - that she can hardly feel the mad sway of her limbs or the stomps of her feet. She reaches the door, seizes the handle, and flings it open.

The first thing she sees is a tall blur skidding past her.

She blinks, stunned, taking much too long to absorb what’s in front of her. Ben is there, bent over, lugging himself back across the distance he overshot himself by. He’s really quite breathless, his hair is a spiky mess, and he’s still covered head to toe in patches of sand. Already, he’s beseeching her with his eyes.

“I’m here,” he wheezes, holding out both arms. Gingerly, but eagerly, he ushers her back into his room, looking at her like she’s some sort of easily spooked woodland creature. “I’m sorry. I’m late. But I’m here.”

He is. He’s here. He’s _really_ here. Not off somewhere else, rubbing his hands together and cackling at the punishment he’d wrought upon her. Not lounging by the poolside, watching the minutes tick by on his smartwatch and smirking maliciously. Not leaning against the restaurant bar, drinking and flirting with some other girl - a nice, pleasant girl, who, perhaps, _hasn’t_ ditched him, attacked him, or made his life a living hell over the past twenty-four hours.

He came for her.

“Where the fuck have you been?” she demands. She doesn’t sound angry, she realises. She sounds desperate.

“I’m sorry. It was my family. They’re setting up the fucking wedding rehearsal. First it was Lando, blabbering on about that piece of junk car he wants back from my dad, and then it was my parents. They caught me trying to sneak up to my room, and then my mom kept talking to me about fucking flowers, and my dad wouldn’t shut up about the fucking fireworks.”

She stares at him, barely processing anything he’s saying.

He clicks the door shut - gently, as if to not scare her. “I tried to get away, I swear, but I couldn’t. It’s my mom. She guilts me. With her words. And face. I don’t know. I can never say no to her.” He latches onto her by the forearms. His touch sends a burst of electricity through her veins. “Don’t go, alright? Stay right here. I’m just gonna quickly shower. It’ll be five minutes. I promise-”

“Shut up.” She wrenches his stupid, handsome, dumbfounded face to hers and kisses his words away.

Her posture melts at the touch of his lips, which are just as full, and hot, and intoxicating as she remembers. He reacts in earnest, driving her straight into the wall, their lips momentarily parting as she gasps at the impact. He’s got his forearms braced on either side of her head and his hips pressed firmly into hers, confining her in a cage of meat and muscle.

She can’t move. She’s trapped, entirely at his mercy. And she wouldn’t have it any other way.

The sensation of his fingers winding into her hair makes her moan. She tilts her head back, panting, as his mouth peppers searing, wet kisses down the side of her neck. Her leg has a mind of its own, sliding up his right hip and curving itself around his waist. It’s like he’s attuned to her every instinct; he snakes his arms under both her thighs and lifts her right off her feet.

She’s never been with a man strong enough to hoist her into his arms as if she were featherweight. The action surprises her, and she tenses, unfamiliar with the rush. But his mouth, brushing hot, open-mouthed kisses along her collarbone, quickly relaxes her.

She removes her arms from their coil around his neck and nudges the straps of her dress off her shoulders. It’s funny - she spent so long picking this thing out in the store, and now all she wants to do is tear it off.

It seems as though he has the same idea. He hastily rolls the top half of the dress down to her waist and buries his face into her cleavage. She moans again, aroused by his tenacity, when he forces her bra down and closes his mouth over her nipple. She arches her back against the sweat-slicked wall, desperate to enhance the delicious sensation.

Holy shit. Ben Solo is currently sucking on her right boob. How did she get here? If someone had gone up to her twenty-four hours ago and told her that this would happen, she would’ve laughed in their stupid face.

The craziest thing is that it all feels so right. The shape, and weight, and pressure of his body feel so snug and so tight and so fitting against hers. If she could, she’d be the person to go back in time and tell her past self what lay in store. She’d tell herself to let go of Finn’s hand, and to stop turning her nose up at Ben. She’d tell herself to engage in just one conversation with the guy, and discover just how strange, and funny, and wicked he really is. She’d tell herself to quit brushing aside the glimmer of attraction that she’d always felt when he teased her, or jabbed her, or smiled at her in the right way. Most of all, she’d tell herself to stop listening to everyone else’s horror stories about him, which, in all the years that she’s known of him, have never been substantiated by anything.

Nobody who can make her feel this good can be that bad. That’s Rey’s logic right now.

The rest of the afternoon is a hot, menacing blur - menacing because, while it’s all happening, Rey is so deeply spellbound that she can scarcely register that it’s happening at all. It’s like being drunk; everything transpires as a series of feelings and impressions.

It’s the expert swirl of his tongue, slick and supple between her legs, as he pins her bare buttocks against the wall. It’s the firmness of his torso, warm and smooth, solid and muscular, rhythmically drilling her into the mattress with every plunge of his hips. It’s the power in his thrust, his movement, his grasp, wilder and rawer than any lover she’s been with.

They christen every inch of this blessed hotel room. They frolic on the bed, abusing the springs and exhausting the headboard. They befoul the couch, leaving sweat and semen that they don’t bother to mop up. They push the shower glass to dangerous limits, no precautions taken as he rams her wet, naked body up against it, over, and over, and over again.

Ordinarily, Rey would be much more sensible about these things. But the stroke of Ben’s nimble fingers sends all rational thought out the window.

She screams through an orgasm under the steaming hot shower, dropping her head back on his shoulder in wanton bliss. He braces her in a vice-like grip as she writhes against his slippery body, her insides tensing and tightening around him.

It’s not the first time she climaxed today. That was when he licked her so hard against the wall that she actually crumpled to the ground. He had to finish her off with her head next to his dress shoes, her toes divinely curling and her inner thighs squeezing against his skull.

It’s not the last time, either. That happens on the bed. She’s sitting on his lap, his arms encasing her torso and his face tucked into the sensitive hollow of her neck, and they’re grinding their hips together in tandem. When she finally does it, moaning in ecstasy against his open mouth, he’s quick to follow suit. The two collapse in a heap together, landing into the pillows with a climactic thump.

They remain like that, clutching, reeling, panting, for God knows how long before she rolls herself off him. His lips are back on hers soon after her head hits the pillow, and they kiss, fiercely and deeply, long after their orgasms have fizzled out.

She didn’t know sex could be like this. Where it feels like her body is constantly screaming out for his. Where she has to cling onto him in a death grip or she might suddenly combust. Where every move he makes feels like it was curated in a script just for her.

After a while, they pull apart. She burrows herself into the curve of his neck, and splays her arm over the breadth of his chest. She breathes him in, his intoxicating scent - a heady mixture of soap and sweat and tangy cologne.

Gradually, she yields to the increasing weight of her eyelids, easing them closed with slowing blinks. The soothing tempo of his swelling chest, coupled with the delicate brush of his fingers through her hair, lulls her into the easiest sleep she’s had in months.

She thinks this is the fastest she’s ever fallen for someone.

* * *

Ben’s stirring way too much to be asleep.

“Hey,” she says, testing the waters.

“Hm?” He sounds sluggish, but cognizant.

She runs her fingertips down the mountain range of his arms. Damn, he’s strong. It made for some _great_ sex. “I’m sorry for ditching you,” she says.

His response is blunt, and it really shouldn’t surprise her by now, but it does. “Yeah, you better be. Fuckin’ hell.”

She lifts her head from his shoulder.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he snaps. “I’m still fucking pissed at you for doing that. I mean, what the fuck?”

She can’t help but giggle. “I know, I know. It was a real dick move. I’m sorry.”

He still looks pissed, but smooths a gentle hand down the small of her back.

“I guess I was just...scared,” she says, dropping her gaze. “You made me feel...different. I can’t explain it. Kind of raw, or savage, almost. Unable to control myself. The way I was before Maz found me.” 

She daren’t look up at him at this confession. It feels like asking someone who definitely doesn’t like you to prom.

“And I’m sorry I attacked you. That’s kind of what I mean when I say ‘savage’. I’m not usually like that,” she continues, feeling like she’s babbling. “Especially not in front of my friends. They’ve never seen that side of me. The worst of me. No one here really has but you. I know that’s a shitty explanation, and it doesn’t excuse what I did, but… I’m sorry.”

She gnaws on her bottom lip, anxiously awaiting his response.

It’s not what she expects. “Alright. I did kind of try to make you jealous.”

She gapes at him. “I knew it!” she squeaks, slapping at his shoulders.

He shields himself with his forearms, grinning impishly through the onslaught. “But _kind of!_ Only kind of.”

“What do you mean ‘kind of’, you little fuck?” she grunts, wrestling him a little by the arms.

“I didn’t wholly intend to,” he says. “I wanted to hang out with Poe because I thought I might get closer to you, or at the very least find out more about you. The eight hundred dollars was an afterthought.”

“And _Cathy?_ ” Rey grimaces at the name.

“Poe offered to wingman me as an option this morning. Just as an option. So it wasn’t part of the original plan. I thought it could’ve been a nice touch, so I agreed. Then we met those girls, and I immediately regretted it.”

“I knew it.” She straddles his lap and pins him down by the chest. “I fucking knew it was about more than just the eight hundred dollars. You fucking liar.”

He yanks her down for a deep, long kiss. She struggles against it at first, but soon relaxes into it. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs.

It makes her smile. “I’m sorry, too.”

* * *

_BANG. BANG. BANG._

Rey peels open an eye. Ben’s lips groan loudly against her earlobe.

_BANG. BANG. BANG BANG BANG._

“What the fuck?” Ben yawns. He props himself up on one elbow, skewering the front door with a murderous glare.

“Who is it?” Rey mumbles, her words all muffled by the pillow.

“Fuck if I know, but they’ll be dead in a minute if they don’t stop.” Stubbornly, he slumps back down, burying his face into Rey’s hair as if he may hide in it.

 _BANG BANG BANG._ “Ben!”

Rey jerks up. “It’s Chewie.”

Ben wrenches himself back upright, squinting through one eye. “Huh?”

Chewie’s voice is no less intimidating through wood than it is coming directly from his seven-foot-tall mouth. “You are late for wedding rehearsal!” it booms. “Come out now!”

It seems as if Chewie has cemented himself as their personal cockblocker.

Rey drags a tired hand down Ben’s back. “You’d better go.”

“Ben!” Chewie roars again. “I will break down door if you do not come out in five seconds! Five!”

“I’m coming!” Ben roars back. By the aggressive rumble in his throat, he’s hella irritated.

“Four!”

“I said I’m coming, Chewie!”

“Three!”

“Shit!” Ben tumbles out of bed.

Rey watches him, smirking, really quite amused.

“Two!” Chewie bellows.

“Alright, alright, alright!” Ben shouts. He staggers to the door, tugging his boxers on along the way. When he’s the bare minimum of modest, he cracks it open about three inches.

There’s a pause. “Where are your clothes?” Chewie asks.

Rey has to stifle her laughter into the pillow.

“I was taking a nap,” Ben says, rather defensively. “Let me get dressed. Five minutes.”

“Two minutes,” Chewie counters.

Ben sighs. Through gritted teeth, he says, “Fine,” and slams the door in Chewie’s face.

He’s got to be one of the extremely few who would dare to do that.

It’s certainly necessary, though. Rey sweeps her bleary gaze across the room, at the suggestive underwear flung sporadically over the furniture, at the rumpled blankets strewn haphazardly onto the floor, at the room service tray cluttered with too many dirty dishes for it to have just been for one.

No, they don’t want Chewie seeing that.

“I gotta go,” Ben says. The regret is prominent in his eyes.

“That’s fine. Do your thing.” Lackadaisically, she stretches her arms over her head, arching her spine against the mattress.

She is still very naked.

He leers at her as he buttons his shirt. “Can you not do that? You’re making it really difficult to leave.”

“Can’t help it if I’m irresistible.”

He gives up halfway through tucking his shirt into his pants and dives at her for a kiss. She catches him by the face with a squeal and a giggle.

 _BANG. BANG._ “Two minutes up!”

Ben groans against her lips.

“Go,” she breathes.

“I’ll see you tonight?”

She laughs. It sounds like a question, like he’s asking her for permission. “Of course.”

He steals one last kiss before departing. And another. And another.

The cockblocker strikes again. “I am kicking down door!”

“O _kay!_ ” Ben yells, sulkier than a ten-year-old. She nudges him off her with a wrinkle of the nose, and he nearly trips over himself scampering away. He flashes her a grin - toothy, crooked, adorable - before he leaves, all the while fumbling with his cufflinks.

She flops back into the pillows, beaming so hard that her face might split in two.

* * *

Males are simple, stupid creatures, and Ben fancies himself no exception.

You can always tell when a guy has gotten laid. He walks a little taller, angles his chin a little higher. He puffs his chest out like a proud rooster. It’s all the more obvious when the sex was actually good, which, in Ben’s case, it most certainly was.

Even Chewie notices it, and he’s never shown a proclivity for behavioural observation. “What is up with you?” he asks as they enter the lobby.

Ben casts him a sidelong glance, consciously tempering the spring in his step. “What?”

“You look...happy. It is very unusual,” Chewie says. “You have intercourse or something?”

“God!” Ben cries. “I’d rather not talk to you about this, thanks.”

A throaty belly laugh billows out of Chewie’s mouth. “Which poor _dévuška_ did you trick this time?”

“Ugh.” Ben quickens his pace in an endeavour to leave the chortling oaf in the dust.

He is thwarted by a hand on the shoulder. “No,” Chewie says. “Down this way.”

“The ceremony’s on the beach.”

“Your mother would like to see you in dressing room.” He gestures to a hallway on Ben’s left. “Down there. Go.”

“What, you’re not gonna _escort_ me?” Ben asks dryly.

“I must find Lando. He has been missing for two hours.”

Shit. Ben chokes back his surprise, and then attempts to make his following suggestion as nonchalant as possible. “U-Uh… Have you checked the pool?”

“Not yet.”

“Hm. Yeah. You might wanna look there.”

Chewie narrows his eyes at him, but swiftly takes his leave.

Yikes.

Ben trudges onward, mentally preparing himself for whatever shitstorm his mother is planning to dump on him this afternoon. He’s so engrossed in his own dread that he doesn’t notice Finn - that stubby, obnoxious little teeny-bopper - swinging out from the male bathroom until they’re about ten feet away from each other.

Ben’s first instinct is to deck that motherfucker in his shit-eating face. But some unfamiliar voice inside him berates him into being nice to Rey’s friend.

So he gives him a nod. “How’s Poe?” he asks.

Finn does not waver in his path. In fact, he shoves right past the other man, knocking him aside by the shoulder. “Fine.”

Ben could kill him for that. He could beat the little shit to death with his bare fucking hands. But he doesn’t. He swivels around to confront him instead. “What the fuck is your problem, man?”

Finn’s heel makes a surprised skid against the carpet. He turns, slowly, nostrils flaring with barely inhibited rage. “What’s my problem?” he repeats, dipping his head.

“Yeah. Your problem. With me.”

Finn coughs out a humourless laugh. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

Oh boy, is Ben glad that Chewie decided to leave him to his own devices. These two are long overdue for a pissing contest.

“What exactly is it that you think I did to you?” Ben asks.

“Oh, I don’t think. I _know_ ,” Finn retorts, consonants harsh with spite. “Everyone does. You irredeemable scumbag.”

_This fucking-_

“Ha!” Ben cackles. “That’s rich, coming from the douchebag who tossed Rey away like garbage.”

Finn’s eyes widen tenfold. “Oh!” he sings with sardonic gusto. “You wanna talk about _Rey,_ now? Well, how about this?” He swaggers right up to Ben, apparently no height difference large enough to intimidate him. “She will never _... ever ..._ touch you. I’ve made sure of it.”

At the cocky sneer on the pompous little shithead’s face, all intention to make amends goes flying out the window.

This fucking idiot thinks he’s won. He truly, genuinely believes it.

Ben allows his own smugness to curl across his lips, his canines flashing as the impending revelation sizzles exquisitely on the tip of his tongue.

Oh, this little shit is about to get _told_.

* * *

Rey loves parties.

The soft murmur of excitement in the pit of her stomach as she hand-picks the perfect dress. The flicker of optimism in her eyes as she sweeps on a coat of mascara. The gratifying freedom in her temples as she lets out her hair and it cascades down her shoulders in soft, shiny waves.

Normally, she’d wear it up, tugging it back into a bun so sleek her scalp would scream for release. But Ben had grunted into her ear that he liked it loose as he grappled it by the roots and pounded her from behind. And then he said it again when they were murmuring to each other in bed, through languid yawns and heavy-lidded eyes.

She thinks she’ll keep it down tonight.

It’s amazing how one person can flip your entire world upside down. This time, when Rey enters the party to a sea of familiar faces, she doesn’t feel dread. She feels comfort.

The twinkle of the fairy lights drooping down from the palm trees warms and soothes her, when the glare of the chandeliers had only blinded her instead. The novelty of the thatched rooftops looming over each wooden table delights her in a way that the previous night’s grandiose centrepieces had failed to do. The feel of the cool sand caressing her feet calms her, massaging away the little aches in her toes from last night’s rickety heels.

Maybe it’s nothing more than pure circumstance. Maybe it’s just that Rey prefers an outdoor luau to a formal sit-down dinner. Or maybe it’s because she’s actually happy tonight.

The night is clear and beautiful. It’s the perfect setting for an outdoor party. Fire-lit torches illuminate the beach in a rich orange hue. Island natives parade the stage with upbeat music and wholesome comedy. Waiters and waitresses dressed in casual summer clothing pass around platefuls of succulent fruits and freshly smoked pork.

Rey finds Maz in the crowd and gathers her in her arms like a bundle of cloth. The woman seems to shrink in size each time Rey sees her, but she always squeezes back with unfailing vigour. They exclaim that it’s been much too long and then begin to reminisce, all fond smiles and squeaky voices and hearty laughs. The two exchange memories of simpler times, when Rey was a gangly teenager who wanted nothing more than to graduate university. She gesticulates buoyantly, tosses her head back in laughter, and curls an affectionate arm around Maz’s frail, tiny frame.

She’s having so much fun.

Ben passes by her more than once. He’s busier tonight, tasked with a lot more than taking half-assed photos. But he comes to her at every opportunity, the two sharing a heated, surreptitious look as he secretly squeezes her hand, or fondles her waist, or tickles his fingers down the small of her back. It feels like a spark from a live wire every time.

It’s really quite thrilling, sneaking around like this. She can’t say she’s always had the best of luck with clandestine affairs. The last one got her kicked out of a devout Christian foster home.

But she’s got a better feeling about this one.

Maz is halfway through a story about Rey’s first experience with durian when Rey notices Ben finally breaking free. For a divine moment, his family relieves him of any responsibility to mingle with clients, or rearrange the garlands, or lecture the wait staff on which dietary requirements apply to whom. She sees him turn to her, locking her in place with his stare. He flicks his head to the side, indicating toward a private nook behind the stage.

“I’m so sorry, Maz,” Rey cuts in, feeling bad, but not enough to not go through with it. “I really gotta go. I need to, uh, poop.”

“O-Oh,” Maz stammers. “Well, go then, child. Relieve yourself. Go, go.”

The crowd is rowdier tonight. Rey has to pretty much thrash her way through it to try to get to Ben. It’s the looser setting, she theorises. People are more inclined to drink when there’s more space to cavort around.

As she nears the perimeter, the crowd begins to dwindle. She can see him along the fringe, patiently waiting and beckoning her with dark, sultry eyes. And just when she thinks she’s reached a clearing, where the sea has magically parted and a path to him is laid out in a straight line before her...

...Finn leaps at her from the side, thwarting her right where she stands.

He looks absolutely. Fucking. Livid. “ _You slept with him?_ ”

She recoils, stupefied. No words come even close to forming in the back of her throat as she stutters, mute, for the several seconds it takes her to register the accusation.

_Ben told someone?_

Her gaze flickers to Ben over Finn’s heaving shoulder, and he scowls back at her quizzically across the sea of partygoers.

“Well?” Finn bellows, thrusting himself back into her line of focus. “You got anything to say to that?”

Rey stills her trembling lip. “W-What makes you think-?”

“Because he fucking told me!” he snarls, before she can even finish the question.

Rey can feel the blood leaving her face. It’s like having a bucket of ice water dumped over her head.

Ben...went...and told...Finn? Directly?

_How could he do this to me?_

Behind Finn, Rose materialises from the bustling crowd. She looks like she’s been chasing him, all breathless and sweaty and tuckered out. “What’s going on?” she demands.

“This doesn’t concern you, Rose,” Finn says, jaw set and hard.

“Like hell it doesn’t!” she retorts. “You two have been acting weird ever since we landed on this island! I want to know what the hell is happening here!”

Her energy surprises Rey. It seems as though the poor girl has finally had enough.

“Fine!” Finn snaps, whirling around to face her. “I’ll tell you what’s happening! Rey is _fucking_ that disgusting _prick_ , Ben Solo!”

“Wha-?” Rose looks just as floored by it all as Rey does. “How do you know that?”

“Because he told me!” Finn yells. He whips back around to Rey. “Yeah, that’s right. He _boasted_ to my face. He talked about you like you were a prize, or a piece of meat.”

“And you believed him?” Rey says, battling down hot tears of betrayal.

That can’t be true. It just can’t. Not with the way Ben was looking at her. Not with the way he touched her, or kissed her, or so intently listened to her as she laid bare to him every inch of her deepest, darkest fears.

It just doesn’t make sense. He wouldn’t do that to her.

“Should I have?” Finn looks angrier than she’s ever seen him. Angrier than in any spat on Ahch-To, or public clash at a restaurant, or private squabble in the car.

A sob breaks through Rey’s lips, and she drops her shoulders in defeat. “You have no right-”

“That’s it,” Finn says - curt, final, cutting her off. “That’s it, then. We’re _through_. I told you that if you hooked up with him, our friendship would be over. And you did. So clearly, you chose that _monster_ over me. _Him_. Who called you a ‘hot piece of ass’ that he ‘conquered like Napoleon’.”

 _That can’t be true_ , Rey pleads. _Oh, God, please don’t let that be true_. “Finn-”

“I’m done with you!” he declares, so loudly that it captures a small radius of curious onlookers. “I told you, Rey! I _told_ you!”

“Please-”

“You didn’t listen! Well, good luck with that asshole. I’m sure he’ll make you a very happy ‘piece of ass’.”

He leaves so rapidly that it makes her flinch, her instincts confusing the sudden movement with physical attack. She is left to gape, trembling and teary-eyed, at Rose’s flabbergasted expression in Finn’s wake.

Rose does not run after him. She lingers, unmoving, staring back at Rey with a combination of astonishment and concern. It makes Rey feel pathetic.

She can’t deal with this right now.

She turns, brusquely rejecting Rose’s unspoken extension of support, and elbows her way through the crowd.

When she finally makes it to him, Ben greets her with an inquisitive frown and outstretched arms. He looks empathetic, like he’s ready to receive her in some sort of comforting embrace.

But she only shoves him against the wall. “ _You told him?_ ” 

God, she sounds delirious. She didn’t know her voice could get that high. But she’s so overwhelmed with white-hot fury that she can’t find it in herself to care.

Ben looks confused, like he can’t possibly fathom what he did wrong. “What?”

“ _Finn!_ ” she snaps, with the wrath of a thousand suns. “You told him we slept together?”

“Well, yeah,” he says, his tone wavering with uncertainty. “But he was provoking me.”

Really? _That’s_ his fucking excuse?

“So you proceeded to broadcast our private business to him like it’s public fucking domain?”

The motherfucker dares to argue. “Wh-? I don’t understand. What is the goddamned problem here?”

Her head is spinning with incredulity. She can’t believe that someone can be so fucking stupid. “What makes you think that you had the right to share that information?”

He frowns at her. The beginnings of a storm start to brew in his eyes. “What makes you think I didn’t?”

And just like that, she hates him again.

Rey can’t even begin to put her immense rage into words, so she decides to let her fists do the talking. But before she can pummel every conceivable surface of his body, he slips out from right under her nose. Rey lurches forward, unbalanced by the inertia.

She raises her head, and yup, lo and behold, there’s Chewie, once again popping up at the perfect time to drag Ben away by the collar. “Fucking- _Not now, Chewie!_ ”

She’s about to charge after them - with full intent to tackle Ben to the ground - when the boom of Leia’s voice overhead gives her pause.

“Good evening, everyone!” she exclaims, the reverb causing a tremor at Rey’s feet. “Thank you so much for coming tonight!”

Shit. It’s _speech time_ again. Rey is starting to understand Ben’s disdain for his family’s excessive showmanship.

She desists, aiming an unhappy glower at him as he thrashes under Chewie’s grasp.

“Stay there!” he yells at her, barely audible over the blare of his mother’s pleasantries. “Don’t go anywhere!”

She deepens her frown as if to say, “Don’t count on it.”

Chewie whisks him further into the crowd. “Rey!” he calls.

 _Go fuck yourself_ , she wants to tell him. She doesn’t owe him shit. She stays, yes - foot tapping, hands fisting - but her patience is already paper thin.

Ben is forced on-stage with a violent shove to the back. Impelled by Leia’s persuasive grip on his forearm, he blunders through a slapdash speech, pasting together mismatched chunks of generic witticisms. This time, his cute little nervous-boy act does nothing to appeal to Rey. In fact, the more he stammers over his words, or scratches the back of his neck, or darts his eyes anxiously between her and his feet, the more she wants to get the fuck out of here.

“U-Um…” he mutters, powering through an awkward lull. “Growing up, I’ve always admired my parents’ relationship.”

Rey can’t do this. Molten lava is coursing through her veins. If she stands here like this for even a minute longer, she might die of a rage-induced stroke.

She’s leaving.

“Even when they were divorced, I… I always…” Ben’s words taper off when he spots her nudging her way to the back. There’s a brief stretch of silence wherein he realises what is happening, after which, to Rey’s dismay, he decides to completely abandon his post. “Wait. No. Rey!”

He drops the microphone to the floor with a discordant thwack, the screech of the resulting feedback eliciting a chain of verbal protests from the audience. 

“Ben?” Leia calls, her intonation surging with bewilderment.

He ignores her, scurrying off-stage, forcing a path through the clamouring mass.

In front. Of. Everyone.

Holy fuck, this is so embarrassing. It’s so dramatic, and so terribly _public_ , but Rey is too hysterical to reverse it now. She can feel the eyes on her, scorching rays of curiosity into her back, as she scrambles her way out to freedom.

Once she’s clear, she makes a mad sprint for the shore, deep into the refuge of darkness and far away from unwanted bystanders. The beach is long, and the sky is dark. She would run all goddamned night if she could.

It isn’t long before she hears his voice, shouting out for her by name. She falters, then slows, easing into a moderate jog, before braking altogether to a gentle halt.

Their confrontation is inevitable, so she turns, hands balled by her sides, waiting for him to catch up. He doubles over to catch his breath when he does.

“I don’t understand,” he says, wheezing, clutching at his side.

The waves are violent tonight. They crash against the shore with a thunderous blast, turbulent like Rey’s emotions.

“What don’t you understand?” Her voice is still but her temper is simmering.

“What are you so mad about?”

Unbelievable. She shakes her head at him. “You told Finn that we slept together.”

“Yeah? And?”

“Do you not know how much he _hates_ you?” She advances on him with an infuriated stomp. “Newsflash, buddy. A _lot_. So what do you think his opinion on us sleeping together is?”

“Who cares?” Ben shrugs his shoulders like it’s the most trivial issue in the world. “Who cares what that little runt thinks?”

“ _I_ care!” Rey screams back. “He’s my friend! I care about what he thinks of me! Don’t you get that? He told me that if I went anywhere near you, he would stop talking to me!”

His face crumples into an incredulous grimace. He laughs - actually _laughs_. “What an asshole.”

“And is it true? Did you really call me a ‘piece of ass’ that you ‘conquered’?”

“Argh.” He drags a hand through his hair. “I didn’t mean it like that, okay? You know I don’t think of you in that way. I just wanted to rub it in his face.”

“You shouldn’t have fucking told him anything!”

“So what if I did?” Somehow he’s still finding a way to argue with her. “You know what? I did you a favour. Now you don’t need to tiptoe around that phoney dipshit.”

“ _That is not for you to decide!_ ” Her pitch has taken on an unprecedented octave.

“Well, what the hell were you gonna do, Rey? Just keep pretending to be someone you’re not for the rest of your life? You’re the one who’s always whining to me about how no one knows the ‘real’ you.”

“It’s _my_ life! He’s _my_ friend! I’m the one who chooses how to deal with it, not _you!_ ”

Jesus Christ. She’s so mad at him she could die. She loathes everything about him right now, from his stupid, fancy hair to his obnoxiously overworked physique. The fiery heat in his eyes does nothing but stoke the raging flames of hatred inside her.

“I _told_ you,” she hisses. “Before we fell asleep, I told you how I felt about all this. About not wanting to reveal this side of myself to my friends. About how scared I was of losing them. You should have respected that.”

He scoffs. “I’m _helping_ you. And this is the thanks I get.”

“You are not _helping_ me!” she shrieks. “I have spent…so, so long building this life for myself. You don’t understand. It took _everything_ for me to get to where I am today. And you’ve torn it all down in the span of less than a weekend.”

“You’re a coward,” he says, sneering. “It’s your own fault that nobody knows you. You’re too afraid to lose your precious popularity, which is the only thing you’ve got going for you in your sham of a life.”

She chokes out a sob. So it’s time to bring out the big guns, huh? “Better than ending up like you. You _love_ the fact that you’re hated because it makes you feel special. You’ve deluded yourself into thinking it’s a good thing when in reality you just don’t know what it’s like to be loved.”

He empties his lungs with a choppy breath. That must have really hurt him. “God, I wish I was never stricken with the _curse_ of knowing you.”

She whimpers through that blow. Fuck, she hates how it’s so easy for her to cry. “Why? Why did you have to take that _fucking_ picture of me? I wish that never happened. I wish _none_ of this ever happened!”

“Yeah, _me too!_ ”

She could fight him again. She could do it. She could tackle him straight into the goddamned sand, and take all her anger out on his stupid, ugly face. But she doesn’t. She knows she shouldn’t. Because she knows what will happen once she does; they’ve been through it all before. They’ll wrestle for a moment, and then they’ll stop. He’ll look at her like she’s the only other person in the world, and she’ll kiss him like he’s the same. He’ll kiss her back, and then suddenly, she’ll fall back under his spell. She’ll believe - and he will, too - that, despite the mounds of evidence suggesting otherwise, they are _cosmically_ meant for each other. And then he’ll disappoint her again, and she’ll disappoint him as well. And they’ll hurt each other so badly that it throws them into another mess. The vicious cycle will never end.

Well, she’s not letting herself get sucked in again.

“Why don’t you do me...the _hugest_ favour…” she begins - quietly, slowly. “...and stay the _fuck_ out of my life?”

He blinks twice. The nasty scowl on his forehead smooths over in surprise. It’s like he also expected her to tackle him, or kick him, or punch him. Anything but the cold-hearted dismissal she gave him instead.

But that’s what it was.

She can’t do this. She can’t stay here. That butthurt puppy-dog look on his face alone is enough to make her cave.

So she leaves. Her foot staggers back half a step, and then another, and then another.

And when she breaks out into a sprint, the brisk, ocean breeze whipping away the tears before they even reach her cheeks, her mind wanders back to soft, wavy hair curling between her fingers; dark, half-open eyes blinking at her in awe; and a soft, crooked mouth smiling against her lips.

How did it get to this?


	4. Don’t give up on me

Rey wakes. Painfully. Her head throbs, her muscles ache, her eyes are swollen. Why is it that she can’t seem to wake to a single peaceful morning on this island?

Her phone tells her it’s almost ten. The breakfast buffet will close in a matter of minutes. Despite the gurgle in her stomach, she’s glad. She wouldn’t have wanted to make it to that anyway. There are far too many people she wishes to avoid. Ben. Finn. Rose. Chewie, who, at this point, is bound to ask questions. Leia, who watched her son nearly stumble over himself scrambling off the stage while shouting Rey’s name. Han and Luke, who were also there and probably witnessed the whole thing. Maz, too. Everyone, really.

She makes the mistake of wondering if the rest of her friends were there as well, and gets swallowed up by a wave of cringe.

Poe. It would probably be hilarious to him. She doesn’t even want to conceive what merciless ridicule he would heap on both her and Ben.

Jannah. She’s so damned up in arms about every single one of her boyfriend’s shortcomings. Imagine her reaction to Rey shacking up with Ben Solo, the king of flawed masculinity.

Paige. Already hates all men. A normal person’s response to this would be ten times as belligerent coming from her.

Zorii. In all honesty, Rey doesn’t know her that well. But she can envisage her judgmental stare, and that’s shameful enough.

How is she going to face them? Any of them? Even a stranger who was privy to the drama last night would be too much. How is she going to set foot outside her room, let alone go to the wedding?

She brings up the browser on her phone and searches for the earliest flight out of Scarif. She’ll spend the money; she doesn’t care. A few hundred dollars is nothing next to the chagrin of being confronted by life’s consequences.

Finn’s name pops up on the screen to stop her. She stares at it blankly for a moment, confirming that she’s not imagining it.

He’s calling her.

* * *

The sky is startlingly clear this morning. There’s not a cloud in sight.

Rey grew up hating clear skies. In Jakku, it meant hotter days, redder skin, and a direr search for water. But today, on the island, where the air is so humid she could drink it, she doesn’t mind it so much. In fact, she might even find it beautiful.

She’s able to enjoy the scenery because, contrary to what she expected, she’s not crippled with overwhelming anxiety. Finn’s voice over the phone had calmed her - not because of what he said, but by the soft, equable way he said it. She’s known Finn for many years. During some of those years, he was even her _person_. She knows when he’s forgiven her.

He told her to meet him on the wooden bench outside the function hall - the same one he’d laid her down on the first night they were here. It seems fitting, Rey supposes, for a proper resolution. It’s like coming full circle.

She plops down next to him without a word. She didn’t need to greet him, or announce herself, because he was already looking up at her long before she reached him.

Tentatively, he takes the initiative. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she replies, flat as the rogue surfboard propped on the wall beside her.

There’s a long pause. Rey doesn’t say anything. She refuses to say anything.

“Rey,” Finn sighs. She starts at the brush of his fingertips over her knuckles. “I’m sorry.”

Oh, how it’s so easy for Rey to cry. At the first note of his apology, she flops her head onto his shoulder and weeps, weeps, weeps into his sleeve.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, hugging her close. “I shouldn’t have said those things. I shouldn’t have made those threats. It was unfair to you, and it was out of line.”

Rey can’t utter a word in response. She’s too busy snivelling, every new phrase out of his mouth only making her cry harder.

“You’re still my _best_ friend, Rey. You’ll always be my best friend,” he continues glumly. “I should’ve never… I didn’t mean to…” His voice thickens to the point where he can’t force it out anymore.

 _Oh my God, get your shit together, woman_ , Rey urges herself. She sniffles up the snot dripping from her nose and wipes off the remainder with her arm. God, she feels disgusting.

“I r-really thought…” she hiccups. “I really thought you were never gonna speak to me again.”

“Of course not. Of course I wasn’t going to do that,” he tells her, shaking her by the shoulder. “I should never have tried to meddle like that, Rey, alright? I’m sorry. As much as I… As much as I _hate_ what you did… It’s your life. And I’m your friend. I’ll be there to help you through it, no matter how I feel about it.”

Rey nods, still swiping at the tears and snot dribbling down her face. “I know you’re still mad at me.”

“Yes,” he says. “I am mad. And when all this is over, and you’ve sorted it all out, we’re gonna have a really, _really_ long talk about it. I mean, I have so many questions. Like…what were you thinking? What happened to your standards? When did you start liking trash-?”

“Finn.”

“Right. Sorry. _After_ ,” he coughs. “But right now, I’m just… I’m just sorry.”

She nods again, teary but mostly settled. “Thank you, Finn.”

He smiles and presses a tender kiss to her temple.

She closes her eyes for a moment, just enjoying this - the feeling of being held by him. It’s not the same as when they were dating. It’s different. It’s more safe, more comfortable. It feels like family. For the first time in the eight months that they’ve been broken up, Rey can see a future where she and Finn are real friends again.

“You have Rose to thank for this, by the way,” Finn says.

Rey cants her head back to frown at him. “Rose?”

“Yeah. I was just…deranged last night. She calmed me down. And this morning, she talked me into seeing you. I’m really glad that she did.”

Rey can feel a little smile curling her lips. Huh. Rose. There’s a friend she didn’t know she still had.

She’ll have to thank her sometime.

“Can you just-?” He stops himself, lightly punching his own knee. “Nah, don’t worry.”

“It’s fine,” Rey says. “What is it?”

He looks at her like he’s trying very hard not to scream it out. “Can you just answer me one thing?”

She doesn’t like where this is going, but if it’s unavoidable, she might as well take it now. “Sure.”

“Why him?”

She sighs. That’s something she’s been grappling over for the past two days.

“I mean, of all the people you could’ve hooked up with on this island,” Finn says, “why did it have to be him? Like, I thought about it. Were you just trying to make me angry? But then why would you hide it from me? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Oh God, she hates to say it. She hates to admit it even to herself, let alone to Finn. But she kind of has to. “Maybe it’s because…” she says, slowly rolling through each word, “...I sort of like him.”

Finn looks positively thunderstruck. It’s like the notion never even occurred to him, despite its startling obviousness. “H…? How…? How could…? How…?”

“Yeah.” She slumps her shoulders on another sigh. “I’m amazed, too.”

“ _Why?_ ” Finn splutters, no less incredulous. “Why would you…? How could you…?”

So much for having this conversation later.

“I just like him, Finn.” As dead as she sounds, her heart is at serious risk of bursting in her chest. “We’re polar opposites, and yet so similar.”

“ _Similar?_ ” His voice gets higher with every revelation. It’s kind of funny, actually. “In what way are you _similar_ to _Ben Solo?_ ” He can’t keep his nose from wrinkling at the name.

“We get each other,” she says, and honestly, that makes her sad. More softly, she adds, “He gets me.”

“What do you mean, Rey? You’re saying that like it’s a special thing.”

“Because nobody else really knows me.”

He looks shocked. “What? I know you. Maz knows you. Our friends know you.”

“No, you _don’t._ ” Her tone hardens on the last syllable. “You all think you do, but you don’t. You all think I’m some pure, virtuous, well-behaved goody-goody, who never drinks, never fights, never gets into nasty shit, but I’m not. I’m sick of everyone telling me all the time what I am. I’m not what you think. I had a really rough childhood that I never told any of you about. I’m not a good person, Finn.”

“You are a good person,” he argues. “Rey, I know you.”

“You _don’t!_ ” Rey screeches, making him flinch. At the frightened bulge of his eyes, she takes a calming breath. “You don’t,” she says again, more quietly. “You never did. Not all of me. Not even when we were together. I never told you about my childhood, or what I was like as a kid. Finn, I nearly bit a man’s finger off for threatening to call the cops on me.”

“You _bit_ a man?” The deep frown lines on his face indicate that he’s not impressed.

So different to Ben’s reaction, which had been to double over in uninhibited laughter.

Rey stutters for a bit, chagrined. “He… I was… He wasn’t a very nice man.”

Finn is doing that thing with his face that he does when he’s flummoxed. His jaw juts out in an underbite and his eyes get all squinty.

He doesn’t say anything, so Rey elaborates. “That part of my life… It made me who I am. But you never really saw it. That’s why I was acting out so much toward the end of our relationship. It’s why… It’s why I broke up with you.”

His expression softens.

“I realised that I couldn’t be with you if I wasn’t able to be myself. So I started to lash out at you a lot, and, well… I mean, I shouldn’t have. But then you kind of just...gave up on me when I did.” She won’t cry again, but she knows she can. “I guess you only loved a certain version of me.”

Finn releases a sharp sigh, dropping his head into his hands.

“I’m sorry,” Rey says. “I shouldn’t have pulled away. I should have been frank with you.”

“No, I’m sorry.” He raises his head to look at her. “I’m sorry I gave up on you.” He squeezes her by the hand, and she squeezes back.

“It’s fine,” she says, and she means it.

It really is fine. She was never really his person, she realises. And he was never really hers.

The anger and resentment she’s been harbouring for months suddenly melts away.

* * *

Her reconciliation with Finn gives Rey the strength to attend the wedding. And, as it turns out, none of their other friends even made it to the rehearsal dinner until much later on in the night, _after_ all the embarrassing drama with Ben happened.

Terribly convenient for anyone involved in said drama.

“They all went to the spa after I took Poe to first aid,” Finn informed her over lunch. “As it so happens, the spa is _very_ relaxing here. Every single one of them lost track of time.”

He then proceeded to dive into a ten-minute-long story about how Poe literally cried on his arm over Zorii after ingesting some pain medication. Apparently, it was just regular ibuprofen and paracetamol.

Rose joined them for lunch, too. “I’m pretty sure you’re not meant to go around telling people this, honey,” she chided. “Poe confided in you.”

Finn shrugged. “I’m sorry, but it was hilarious.”

Now, Rey is back in her room, staring at herself in the body-length mirror. She’s got a nice dress on for the wedding. It’s baby pink, has a nice drape to it, and has a flattering sweetheart neckline. It’s the perfect good-girl dress.

She gathers her hair into a bun, holding it in place with one hand. It doesn’t feel right. She releases it, and it spills down to her shoulders in messy waves. Yeah. That’s a bit better.

According to their group chat, her friends intend to meet down at the restaurant bar for some pre-drinks before the wedding. It never occurred to Rey that her friends may be alcoholics, but it’s only a little over two o’clock in the afternoon; it’s more than likely.

She opts to join them, so she rides the elevator down with her shoes in one hand and a purse in the other. On bare feet, she pads across the lobby, noting the distinct change in decor. There’s a new Instagram photo op every few feet of walking distance. Frangipani wreaths line every available inch of the window panes. Fairy lights adorn the ceiling and furniture. Giant wooden signs painted white and gold usher today’s guests to where they need to go in elegant, hand-painted font.

Leia really rolled out the red carpet for this, didn’t she? She’s got the whole resort wrapped around her finger.

The bar looks sort of fancy from where she’s standing, so Rey decides it’s time to get serious. She drops a shoe onto the floor and attempts to wrestle her foot into it, swearing like a sailor when it only meets resistance.

It’s in this state that she hears her name. “Rey.”

That voice. It’s so distinctive, even without all the baggage that comes with it. That husky rumble alone is enough to make her quiver.

She turns, finally managing to wedge her foot into its rightful home. A cool, mechanical smile stretches across her face, but her insides are having a nuclear meltdown.

Ben approaches her from across the room. She’s not gonna lie, he looks a bit shit. He’s dressed up nice and proper in a black tux, but his hair is untamed, and his under-eyes are almost as dark as his irises. Nevertheless, she finds him handsome, her hands reflexively twitching to reach out and touch him.

He mirrors her phoney smile, looking like he’s just as fucked up underneath it all as she is. She wonders if he was drinking until late last night. His demeanour definitely points to a hangover. “Uh… You free to talk?”

She’s never seen him so vulnerable - not even when she loomed over him on the beach and demanded his room key. It’s a strange look on him. “Yeah,” she says, restlessly tapping her purse against her wrist.

“We can, uh…” He peers around, scowling with effort. “We can just do it here.”

“Sure.”

He’s nervous. He runs his fingers through his hair more than once, before noticing his own tic and jamming his hands into his pockets. “You look pretty. How are you?”

 _How am I?_ Since when was Ben one to engage in small talk?

“Like,” he continues, most likely feeling stupid, “how was your morning?”

“I slept through most of it,” she says frankly. “Had a chat with Finn. Then we went to lunch.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “Oh? You guys are… Everything good?”

Why does he have to be so cute? Why does she have to be so attracted to him?

“Yeah. Everything’s good now. We sorted it all out.”

“That’s… That’s great.”

“Yeah. It’ll make the flight back tonight a lot less awkward.”

There’s a pause. She can see him processing that on his face. “Tonight?” he repeats, choking a bit on the second syllable. “You’re flying back tonight? Why not tomorrow morning?”

“It was cheaper,” she says. “Scarif ain’t cheap.”

“Yeah. Right.”

She nods, pushing her lips together. Guests who have just arrived begin to trickle in through the lobby, spilling into the room around them like a gush of water. Their conversation won’t remain private for long. _Come on, then. Tell me what you really want._

“Listen,” he starts, finally feeling the pressure, “I just wanna say that I’m sorry for how everything turned out.”

She swallows. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I could have handled the whole thing a lot better.” His mouth takes on a sheepish slant. “I’m sorry it all ended up that way.”

Her heart plunges. Somehow, there’s still a little spark of hope in her that she didn’t even know existed. She can feel it now, waning with the words _ended up_. “I’m sorry, too,” she murmurs, and it’s as half-assed as anything.

She surveys him, searches his eyes. As she awaits his response with bated breath, she thinks back to the way he looked at her that first night, when she was dangling her legs off the bartop and he was cradling her by the waist. She thinks back to their first kiss, and how he breathed her in so deeply it was like she was his last reserve of air. She thinks back to how firmly he held her during every livelong second of sex, and the desperation in his airtight embrace.

_Don’t give up on me._

“Well,” he says through an exhale, “enjoy the wedding.”

And just like that, the spark is snuffed out.

She’s never tried harder to suppress her tears. Not even when she broke up with Finn, and he put absolutely zero effort into fighting her on it. Not even when she got expelled from tenth grade, and she found Maz waiting for her in the principal’s office. Not even when she was four and watched the back of her parents’ truck speeding away down a sandy track.

Because in all those instances, Rey had somewhat known in advance that life would be fucking her. When it eventually happened, it felt like release, so there was no reason to hold back her grief. This time, however, she genuinely believed it wouldn’t. This time, she thought there was still a chance.

Rey had finally found her person. Her _real_ person.

But she supposes that she’s just not his.

“You too,” she forces out, amazed by how even her voice sounds. Dead and empty, but even, nonetheless.

As she ponders her next move, “It Must Have Been Love” by Roxette gently streams down from the speakers in the ceiling.

 _Huh. How strangely fitting_.

She decides there’s no point in prolonging this. It’s a natural end to the conversation, regardless of the context. So she drops her other shoe, and it lands on the floor with an emphatic thwack. Thankfully, it doesn’t take her as long to cram her right foot into it.

She supplies him with a tight-lipped smile, a tiny nod, and then treads off, not even bothering to gauge what his reaction to that is. Happy, sad, indifferent. It doesn’t matter.

It’s over now.

* * *

This is a wedding between a fifty-five-year-old and a sixty-eight-year-old. So, naturally, the playlist blaring through every godforsaken speaker in the building is going to consist almost exclusively of 80’s music. Which turns out to be a bad thing for Ben.

He had to listen to Michael Bolton implore “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You” on his way down the elevator. “It Must Have Been Love” by Roxette tormented him as he was wrapping things up with Rey. And now, Bonnie Tyler is wailing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” into his ears in the dressing room.

It’s bad enough that these songs remind him of his shitty, separated-family childhood. To this day, he’s haunted by the memory of his mother’s muffled sobs through the walls, oftentimes with this very song to accompany it. He remembers pressing his ear right up against her bedroom door, waiting for up to an hour at a time for the haunting sound to stop.

Now that he can draw tenuous parallels between these emo lyrics and his own pathetic life, it makes it all the more torturous.

He swore he would never turn into his parents. Up until now, he thought that was achievable.

“Hey, did it ever occur to you to have a wedding playlist that _wasn’t_ fucking depressing?”

Han is behind him, gawking into the mirror as he toys with his own collar. His reflection scowls at Ben’s reflection. “Your mom chose it. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Ben grumbles. “It’s just this music makes me wanna kill myself.”

“Oh, come on. It’s not that bad. You’re only focusing on the sad songs.” Han drops his hands and turns to examine his son’s poor attempt at a bow tie.

Ben tenses at the holes of judgment his father’s eyes drill into his back. He angles his body to shield his fumbling fingers from sight.

“Here,” Han says, having none of it. He bats Ben’s hands away and undoes the entire thing after deeming it unsalvageable. Ben can sense his old man hesitating, and dreads whatever it is that’s about to come out of his mouth. “Is this about Rey?”

He was right to dread it. “Yeah, you know, I really don’t wanna talk about this.”

“I noticed you two were both covered in sand yesterday. What was up with that?”

“Dad, I said I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Why not? I’m your dad. You can tell me.”

“That’s exactly why I _don’t_ want to talk about this with you.”

Han huffs, a faint smile playing on his lips. He pinches the bow tie in place with one hand and uses the other to tidy up a lock of Ben’s hair. As Ben flinches out of the way, Han coaxes, “Come on, kid. I won’t judge ya. I’ll only offer you some wisdom.” He fixes the bow tie with a final twist.

Ben’s hand is quick to dismiss Han’s when it’s done. “I’m alright, thanks,” he snips, arching away. He fiddles with the finished product in the mirror, hoping to drown all his focus into it so as to avoid this excruciating conversation.

But Han’s not finished yet. “Look,” he says, “I don’t know what’s going on between you two - whether it’s platonic, or… _romantic_ , or-”

“Oh God, stop talking, _please_.”

“I mean, Rey is a nice girl. A bit young, but-”

“ _Dad!_ ”

“I’ll just say this,” Han continues, powering through the resistance. “I wasted twenty years of my life refusing to fight for your mother. That’s twenty years I could have spent with her, working through everything and making things right. I could’ve been happy.”

Ben is stubborn. _No, you couldn’t have_. _You would’ve been just as unhappy together as you were apart, if not more._

“But I was afraid,” Han says. “It just hurt so much the first time.”

Ben’s eyes flicker to his dad’s in the mirror. Despite himself, he feels a speck of surprise. Fear is not something he associated with Han’s decision to leave. Resentment, yes. Selfishness. But not fear.

“Now, I’m one of the lucky ones. By some miracle, after all those years, I got her back.” Han shows no timidity in smirking toothily at that. “But the vast majority are not so lucky.”

He levels his son a meaningful look, which ends up making the both of them uncomfortable. They glance away at the same time, fidgeting with their clothes and clearing their throats. Ben can’t remember the last time he had a one-on-one with his father.

“That’s all I’ll say, I promise,” Han coughs. “I’m not assuming, or, you know, _insinuating_ anything. It’s my wedding day. It’s just a nice speech I wanna make about my future wife.”

Ben sighs as he combs his hair with his fingers. He feels awkward, so he reverts to what he knows best: antagonism. “Are you just trying to stir up drama as an excuse to not go through with this?”

Han’s eyebrows crinkle together, but he looks more annoyed than hurt. “Now, where the hell did you get an idea like that?”

In a petty act of mild revenge, he tugs on Ben’s bow tie, unfastening it to square one.

“Aw, fuck!” Ben protests.

“Go find your mother,” Han snaps. “She’s probably stressed out of her mind right now.”

Ben groans. “Fine.” He hesitates, and then, “Can you-?”

“Yeah, c’mere.”

* * *

It’s the first wedding Rey’s ever been invited to, so she really didn’t know what to expect.

Whatever it was, it sure wasn’t this.

It’s more of a concert than a wedding. The turnout is insane. She’s known the Skywalkers for a little over six years, and she still can’t fathom how they can be so insanely successful, wealthy, and popular without being insufferable at the same time.

Rey and her friends are lucky to count themselves as relatively important amongst the hundreds of guests in attendance today. They are designated a row of lovely, cushioned seats near the front of the ceremony. Each chair is adorned with a small but exquisite arrangement of frangipanis strapped to the wooden back. Poe wondered aloud if he could keep his for a souvenir, only to be silenced by a shush of admonishment from Finn.

The heavens have really opened up for them today. Not one, but two photography drones whizz by overhead, cleaving the royal blue sky. Only fluffy, white clouds dot the distant horizon.

Bamboo columns capped with pretty flower bouquets line the fifty-yard aisle down which Leia elegantly glides, escorted on the arm by her brother Luke. Her long, shimmering trail slithers through the river of pink and yellow flower petals sprinkled along the snow-white aisle runner. At practically sixty, she’s the prettiest woman Rey has ever seen.

“She looks like a literal angel,” Rose whispers, and Rey agrees.

 _Well, don’t you look dapper?_ Rey wants to say to Luke as he passes by her row. She doesn’t, because she knows what manners are now, but he really does look quite adorable. He’s an academic, so his typical attire consists of tweed, tweed, and more tweed. The satiny tux he’s sporting today is rather fetching on him.

Han awaits them before a downright monstrous arch of frangipanis. He looks odd, almost out of place, in front of such an ostentatious display. Rey knows Han well; he sticks out like a sore thumb when it comes to this stuff. He’s gruff, awkward, blunt, and the least showy man she knows. But by the euphoric look on his face, and Luke and Leia’s matching grins of elation, he wouldn’t belong anywhere else.

The unadulterated love in his smile brings tears to Rey’s eyes.

Rey remembers that smile. She saw it the day Han stamped into the office and announced in an offhand murmur that he was engaged. He was shy to say it - embarrassed, even - and immediately followed it up with, “I know, I know. What’s an old fart like me doin’, gettin’ married?” But that smile told Rey everything. The old fart was thrilled.

A flash of the same smile on his son’s face, peeking out at her through blankets, pillows, and scruffy black hair, crashes into her like a monster truck. The tears spill over.

Good thing everyone around her is crying, too.

“Holy fuck, they’re so in love,” Jannah mutters on her left. “When am I gonna find that?”

Rey chuckles, dabbing at the moisture on her cheeks with the back of her hand. “When you dump that good-for-nothing boyfriend of yours.”

She can sense Jannah’s stare on her, and for a second, she’s afraid she’s said too much.

“Maybe you’re right, Rey,” Jannah laughs. She curls an affectionate arm around hers, and Rey gladly accepts it.

The ceremony goes off without a hitch. Vows are exchanged with no hesitation - in fact, Han even comes in early on one of them, spurring a smattering of fond laughter - and the happy couple share a chaste but deep kiss. Leia’s eyes widen when Han lifts her feet off the ground, and she smacks at him to let her down. Rey grins so widely her dimples ache. It wouldn’t be Han and Leia without a little quirk like that.

And she really tried not to do it - really, she did. She ignored him when he passed her down the aisle; she cast her line of sight downward when he was standing up at the altar; she refused to so much as glance at him even once throughout the whole ceremony. But her gaze can’t help but sweep in on Ben at the very last second, as the bride and groom are flitting off, hand-in-hand, to a thundering ovation.

He stands between Chewie and Lando, joining them in a round of courteous applause. His tux looks a perfect fit on him from down here, and his bow tie is just a tad wonky on his neck. As always, he’s tall, he’s dashing, and he’s equal parts his father and mother in danger and refinement respectively. But he’s another thing Rey didn’t expect.

He’s smiling.

* * *

The beach is so serene this afternoon - a perfect antithesis to the turmoil of yesterday’s weather. Rey sits, breathing in the heady concoction of smells swirling through the gentle breeze. The mustiness of the sand. The saltiness of the air. The earthiness of the seaweed. They entrance and intoxicate her.

It’s so different here, the sand. It’s damp. It’s cushiony. It blankets her hand, hugs her fingers. It doesn’t drain through the cracks as inevitably as the passage of time.

Waves roll onto the shore in calm, frothy ripples, licking at her toes. Her eyes flutter shut at the sensation. It reminds her of the first time she tried ice cream.

“You’re not supposed to be out here, child.”

Maz’s voice evokes an instinctive smile. Rey twists to greet the dinky old lady doddering up to her in the sand. Her smile widens as she watches her struggle, but strive, to hop over a strip of gnarly-looking seaweed. She makes it across with a rickety skid against the sand, but quickly collects herself with a huff and a tweak of her big round glasses.

Rey used to cry herself to sleep at the thought of Maz aging. After all, she’d met her as a fit, hardy sixty-year-old, and watched her wither into a frail, grey-haired senior over the course of eight years. But witnessing first-hand just how far this woman’s tenacity can take her, Rey wouldn’t be surprised if Maz outlived even Rey.

“The reception is due to start in a half hour. They’ll be serving entrées not long after,” Maz advises. In spite of her own words, she plonks herself down beside Rey, groaning at the physical exertion.

Rey reflexively rests her cheek on the old woman’s bony shoulder. If she closes her eyes, she can imagine they’re back home in Takodana, chatting and tossing fish food into Maz’s mini koi pond.

Maz reaches her wizened fingers up to caress Rey’s cheekbone. “What’s on your mind, child?”

Ah, the waterworks. Even a pin drop can make Rey cry these days. “I think you know,” she says thickly, attempting to sniff away her tears and failing.

“Well, I don’t know everything. I’m not a mindreader,” Maz says, and the sass in her tone makes Rey giggle. “But I can hazard a guess. Han’s boy called your name out on stage last night and then chased you out of the party.”

Although she saw it coming, the very mention of Ben Solo makes Rey’s heart leap. How is this man’s effect still so strong on her?

“I assume that maybe he has something to do with it,” Maz posits.

Rey nibbles on a loose hangnail. “Are you ashamed of me?”

“For what, child?” Maz sounds alarmed.

“I got bamboozled by him,” Rey sniffles. “He got me. Just like he got all those other girls Luke told me about.”

“Ha!” Maz snorts, so loudly that it startles Rey. “What other girls? What does Luke know? He hasn’t spent more than five minutes alone with his nephew in ten years. He’s probably telling you horror stories because he just doesn’t want you to end up like Ben.”

“How do you know that?”

“That boy is his father’s son,” Maz says with a dismissive wave of the hand. “And Han was faithful to Leia, and only Leia, in all their years of separation. I know this because he confided in me several times throughout their divorce. He was a fool, trying to win her back by inciting jealousy.”

“Han never saw anyone else?”

“No!” Maz howls, as if the idea is wildly amusing to her. “And his boy - I see the very same eyes in him. He is not a philanderer. Those two men do not open up to people readily. Any simpleton can see that.”

Rey sort of figured that, deep down. She could tell by the way he was with her that he is, by no means, a playboy. But it’s just the easier fable to cling onto. It makes more sense than the alternative, which is that he feels the same way for her as she does for him, but for some reason is entirely acquiescent to letting her go.

“I am not ashamed of you for being _sweet_ on Ben Solo,” Maz says, her timbre tremoring with amusement. “He is not as disagreeable as some people, including himself, make him out to be.”

“It doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s too messy between us. He’s given up on me already.”

“Hmmm,” Maz drones. “Given up on you? Well, what did you say to him?”

“I… I told him to stay out of my life.”

Her high-pitched wheeze startles Rey again. “Well, then what did you expect, child? You told him to bow out, so he bowed out!”

Rey pulls her head upright to frown at Maz in perplexity.

“It’s the exact same thing you did with Finn!” Maz hoots. “You were the first to give up, not him, and yet you condemn him for what you started.”

Rey plops her chin onto her kneecaps. “You don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand?”

“Everyone just gives up on me.” The declaration is muffled by her knees, making her sound ten years younger. “My mum. My dad. My four different foster families. I have to change myself so that they won’t.”

Maz sighs out a heavy-hearted _oh_. She winds a scrawny arm over Rey’s quaking shoulders, shaking her head like what Rey just said was blasphemy. “My dear child, I’ve known who you are since the moment you came into my home. And I never gave up on you.”

The sand at Rey’s feet begins to blur.

“Do you think I adopted you without learning a thing about your background? I read through every scribble in your file,” Maz reveals. “I know where you come from. I know what you did. I saw your eyes the moment I met you. You were no ordinary child; you _are_ no ordinary girl. But I still love you.”

Rey didn’t know she needed to hear this. She didn’t know that these words from Maz formed the long-awaited answer to her lifelong problem. But they do, and she collapses into them. 

Someone has been fighting for her all along. How could she have been so blind not to see that?

Maz’s grip on Rey’s hand is much too sturdy for a woman of her fragility. “Do not be afraid of who you are,” she whispers fiercely. “You are not a bad person because of your roots. You have learnt and you have grown from them. And today you are a strong, beautiful woman, who only does good for the people she loves. That makes you a wonderful person.”

Rey could, if she wanted to, squeeze her eyes shut and pretend she’s hearing this from her mother. She could pretend that she’s four, or ten, or twenty, and that she’s lying down on Jakku sand with her head in her mother’s lap and soft, tender fingers brushing through her hair. But she doesn’t need to.

By the time Rey had ended up with Maz, she was too old, and too moody, and too jaded to call her anything but by name. When she had eventually grown to love the woman, it was too late to suddenly jump to “Mum”.

But that’s what she was. The mother Rey never had.

And that’s what she will always be.

Together, they sit, fingers interlaced, frames huddled closely. Silently, they watch the sun set, and don’t move until it has slinked far below the horizon.

* * *

There are far, far too many people here. It’s just ridiculous at this point. Ben seriously doubts his parents give a single shit about eighty percent of these sycophantic fuckfaces.

They had to book out pretty much half the resort to accommodate everyone. Half the reception guests are dispersed along the beach, the other half corralled into the function hall. Both venues are equally grandiose. Ben doesn’t even want to know the size of the bill his parents are footing for this shit.

He’s mind-numbingly bored as he nudges his filet mignon around with a fork, desperately attempting to tune out the insipid banter being hurled back and forth between Han and his idiot best friends. The three old farts are bickering over some stupid fight they had thirty years ago, and being loud and unbearably crass while they’re at it. Apparently, Han had gotten into a little trouble with the bank, and Lando had promised to help him out. Chewie ended up being the one to-

_No, stop. Stop listening to these buffoons._

Ben would save himself the trouble and just, you know, get up and leave, but the wedding party table is where he feels safest. So he collapses his head onto his forearms, hoping that maybe if he tries hard enough, he can go into literal hibernation until this whole night is over.

* * *

It’s in this dispirited pose that Leia Organa comes across her son. She peruses him for a moment, bleary eyed and tipsy, her fingernails digging crescents into the back of her chair.

He’s such a big boy now, but he somehow manages to look so small.

“Ben!” she calls, her hand finding his thick, shaggy hair. She idly observes to herself that he needs a haircut as he stirs uncomfortably and glowers up at her in annoyance.

“What is it?” he asks, and the question is rather snippy. He’s gentle in nudging her hand away, but his rigid posture paints a picture of hostility.

Leia can certainly see how most people find her son…intimidating, to say the least. Not only does he have the body of a sasquatch, but his countenance is perennially aggressive, as if prepared for warfare at every waking second of the day.

But beneath that tall, burly frame and those broad, squared shoulders, she still sees the small, lanky boy who cried in her lap when some older kids broke his skateboard. Behind the sharp chisel of his cheekbones and the frigid clench of his jaw, she sees plump, rosy cheeks and soft, pouty lips, sulking at her because Han had scolded him for tinkering under the Falcon’s hood. And past the cold, hawk-like glare and harsh, contemptuous frown, she sees the two brown eyes that _twinkled_ up at her in awe as she eased a pacifier into his mouth.

Leia will never fear her baby boy.

That’s why she can aim a cheeky smile at him, reach out a hand, and say, “Indulge your mother with a dance.”

His eyes flash from exasperation to suspicion. “Why?”

She scoffs with her whole body. “Because it’s my wedding night, and I want to dance with my son.”

“Really? It’s not a trap?”

The boy can be so frustrating at times. It’s like he relishes pushing people’s buttons. “A trap for what, Ben?”

“Interrogation.”

“Is there something I _should_ be interrogating you about?”

His eyelids flutter open and shut in apprehension. “No,” he forces out eventually.

She rolls her eyes and wriggles her fingers at him. “Come on,” she whispers, as if beckoning a timid horse.

He’s undoubtedly hesitant as he takes her hand; even more so when she drags him to the dance floor. She remembers how keen he’d been to dance with her the day she first taught him how to waltz. He was only up to her hip, and he had just recovered from a sprained ankle, but by the end of the lesson he was leading her through every step like a champ. If only he could summon the same enthusiasm today.

Maybe he can. The live band is playing a charming rendition of Journey’s “Open Arms”, a conveniently triple-meter song.

“You remember how to waltz?” she asks, though she very well knows the answer.

“You know I do.” He slides into the starting position as effortlessly as the waves wash onto the shore outside.

This makes Leia smile. “You remember who taught you how?” She sways to his lead.

He’s perfectly on rhythm, like it’s as easy to him as breathing. Leia, on the other hand, is blundering through the steps.

_Right foot back, left foot sideways, close to left. Left foot back, right foot sideways, close to right._

“Did anyone teach _you_ how?” Ben quips.

Leia chuckles. “Champagne is getting to my head already.”

“I think you’re the reason I’m an alcoholic.”

“Oh, hush.” She peeves him with a light pat on the cheek. “Three champagne glasses on my wedding night is not alcoholism.” When that garners no response, she cranes her neck back to look at him. He wears a tuxedo well. Just like his father. “You look so handsome tonight, Ben.”

He makes that face he does when he’s so embarrassed he could blush. The pink tinge on his cheeks never returned after adolescence, but she knows that the tips of his ears are reddening beneath that scruffy mane of hair.

Her inkling is only affirmed when he pushes through a change of topic. “So, no more chores for me today?”

“Pah!” she barks. “Is that all my presence has become to you? A harbinger of interrogation or…or chores?”

The extent of his answer is a cursory, one-shouldered shrug.

No. Surely not. Surely he’s just being contentious again.

But Leia starts to think about it. She can’t remember the last time she interacted with him for anything else.

“Well, you’ve… You’ve done a wonderful job so far, Ben,” she stammers.

“Really?” he chuckles. It’s a dark, dubious chuckle. “Even with the photos I took at the welcome party?”

“What’s wrong with the photos you took at the welcome party?”

“Nothing,” he says, suspiciously prompt.

Leia tuts. She doesn’t want to imagine what he means by that - if he only took crude photos of attractive women or if he didn’t take any at all. “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter too much. In retrospect I do see that having three parties was gratuitous. We could have done without the first one.”

“Yes,” Ben agrees - a rare occurrence. “I could have done without it, too.”

“What’s important was the wedding,” Leia says. “How did you find it, Ben?”

The corner of his mouth does a little quirk, heralding the arrival of something snarky. But then he looks down, meeting her eyes, and the smirk is quick to fade. “It was nice,” he concedes.

Leia smiles, sagging her shoulders with a contented sigh. He’s humouring her, she knows, but she appreciates it over the callous remark that would have been his genuine answer. She slumps her cheek into his chest and forces them into a slow, rocking amble. “I think,” she murmurs, “after tonight, things will start to go back to the way they were. Before this whole mess happened.”

His torso lurches with a skeptical scoff. “Yeah, don’t hold your breath, Mom.”

She opens her eyes, which she didn’t know she had closed. “What do you mean? You don’t think we’ll be happy?”

He pauses, more out of emphasis than contemplation. “Happiness is illusory. We all end up in the same place: sad and alone.”

His statement surprises her. As dark and ill-tempered and pessimistic as Ben is, she never expected to hear something so profoundly bleak from him. When had her son become so cynical? 

Was it the first time his father stormed out, clutching a duffel bag in one hand, and then revved the Falcon so loudly the window panes rattled? Was it when she sent him away to his uncle’s boarding school, promising him a monthly visit that ended up being biannual? Was it when Luke officially reneged on Ben’s employment contract, and neither Leia nor Han stepped forth to dispute it?

She can’t fight it anymore. The avalanche of remorse engulfs her.

In more ways than one, Leia has failed her son.

When she cocks her head back to look at him, her vision is clouded by tears. “Oh, Ben.” His name sputters on its way out of her throat.

He stills, sensing her distress, and his fingers slacken on her waist.

She composes herself with two shuddering breaths, and then folds a hand over each side of his face. Her thumbs skim the dark circles under his eyes, and he just looks so young right now, blinking back at her with foreboding and unease. She smiles. “I’m so sorry.”

Panic skips across his eyes. If she blinked, she might have missed it. Every muscle in his body seems to freeze into place, her apology paralysing him from head to toe.

It pours out of her again. “I’m so sorry, Ben.” And again. “I’m sorry.”

He releases her and takes a wary step back, as if physical distance might shield him from the emotional barrage. For a moment, it looks as though he’s warring with himself: _Further this, or bail?_ And then he says, “For what?”

A swarm of rowdy young people skirt around them, missing them by a hair’s breadth. They’re an obstruction, Leia realises, standing still like this.

So she ushers Ben to the side by the clutch of his forearms, and she doesn’t let go, even when they’ve cleared the dance floor. In his quizzical scowl, she sees the eyes of a lost young boy, scared and alone and in desperate need of love. “We were never really there for you, were we?”

He blinks twice in quick succession, and then sends his gaze to the ceiling. His tongue, normally so quick to snap back with a clever retort, remains grimly held.

“We should have been,” she adds. In the absence of a reaction, she wonders if he hears her at all. She’s quiet enough, her voice weakened by her own chagrin, without the surrounding hubbub of chatter to drown her. Her next few words, repeated but still the most pivotal of all, she heaves out with flawless diction. “I’m so sorry, Ben.”

She can feel him - both physically and emotionally - showing resistance, pulling away. 

She only tightens her grip. “We were too hard on you. I should have never sent you away. That’s when I lost you. That’s when I lost you both.”

He laughs - a terse, wavering, humourless thing. Stubbornly, he twists his arms out of her grasp and sweeps both hands through his hair. He falls back a step, retreads it, and then falls back again. “You’re not going to shower me with empty platitudes now, are you?”

“No!” Leia exclaims, confronted. Is that really all she is to him? “I just… I just want…”

She looks at him. He’s guarded behind ten layers of steel, but to her it’s clear as day.

He’s so afraid.

“I don’t want you to be afraid anymore,” she tells him.

“Of-?”

“Of trusting people.” Her arms extend for him, but he swerves out of reach. “To love, and be loved.”

His eyes glisten with betrayal. He glares at her like he’s been ambushed. Like he was right to think it was a trap. “Why are you saying this?”

“It’s a risk, yes,” she continues, hurtling past his question. “You can always, always get hurt. And you will. If you love truly, and if you love deeply, you are guaranteed pain. But if it’s right, then it’s worth it. You can be happy, Ben.”

Finally, he provides a response that isn’t evasive. “You don’t know that.” He looks just as frightened as he does combative. “You don’t know that you and Dad will be happy this time.”

“No, I don’t,” she admits. “I don’t know that. You never really know.” This time, when she reaches for him, he doesn’t retract. His shoulders are stiff as a board under her hands, but at least he doesn’t curl away. “But like I said, it’s worth the pain.”

His chest swells. He looks like he’s struggling to moderate the clipped gasps of panicked breath bursting out from his lungs. Like he wants to scream, or laugh, or cry. He’s a spitting image of his adolescent self, the day she told him she’d be sending him off to Luke.

She soothes him with a soft hand to the side of his face. She wishes she could jump back to that moment, and say to him then what she is about to say now. “We weren’t there for you, Ben. But we will be. I know it’s too little too late, but we’ll try.” Her thumb traces the curve of his cheekbone. It’s as soft now as it was then. “My sweet boy,” she sighs. “We love you so much; we always have.”

Ben doesn’t move. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t breathe, doesn’t say anything. But his eyes are laden with melancholy, every facial muscle tensing with emotion.

He must have thought that he would never hear those words from her.

She does what a mother would do - what she should have done, all this time - when her child is scared. She draws him into an embrace, and cradles him in her arms. He’s so tall that she has to rise to the tips of her toes just to reach around his neck, but she manages, and to her, he still feels small. She releases a teary laugh, amazed at how he’s grown.

His reciprocation is tentative, but earnest. He’s silent, unresponsive, his body language reserved; but he rests his palms on her shoulder blades, just barely more than hovering, and tilts his chin ever so slightly into her temple. 

He may never believe her vow to him today. Heaven knows she has disappointed him in the past. But he certainly hears it, and he certainly knows.

“Don’t worry,” Leia whispers, smoothing a hand down his soft, wavy hair. “You don’t need to make another speech tonight.”

She feels him relax under her arms. “Oh, thank God.”


	5. Life-ruining disasters of cataclysmic proportions

The opening saxophone riff to “Careless Whisper” ripples through the speakers.

When riotous howls of approval erupt from the dance floor, Rey immediately knows who the culprits are.

She looks over to her friends, who are all exclaiming in varying degrees of jubilation as they jostle Poe around on his still very injured ankle. She’s not sure what the tortured wince on his face is in reaction to: the physical pain or the merciless ridicule. Most likely both.

“Careless Whisper” was one of Poe’s favourite songs back in high school. They all know this because Finn once found a video of him dressed as George Michael for Halloween, bellowing out the lyrics in front of a bathroom mirror. He was somewhere in his late teens, and his hair was so long he had it pulled back in a ponytail. It was immortalised in their group chat not five minutes later.

Poor Poe. He’d been having such a great time, carefully hopping around in a cute little improvised dance with Zorii, before that song came on to personally torment him.

Finn singles Rey out from his spot on the dance floor, frantically waving her over with his whole body. She responds with a smile, a knowing roll of the eyes, and an open-palmed wave of rejection. He pulls a comical expression of disappointment and flicks a hand at her in dismissal.

Make no mistake, Rey does love to dance. And she would seldom pass up an opportunity to bully Poe into oblivion. But she’s done her fair share of dancing, and hollering, and roughhousing for the night. She’s scoffed down enough food, thrown back enough drinks, and shot enough piña colada out her nose from laughing too hard.

Now, she’s content to just sit back and watch the people around her get progressively drunker and stupider throughout the night. Ideally, she’d have someone cool beside her to trade snide remarks and judgy witticisms with.

Something not too different to how she spent her first night here.

But alas, there’s no such person to keep her company, and she finds herself alone, once again, sipping champagne at an empty table.

Rey hasn’t seen Ben at all since the wedding. After the ceremony, she planned to accost him in a final ditch effort to make things work between them, which may or may not have involved some more tears and a humble touch of light begging. But he was one quick bastard, ducking away behind a pocket of crowd and slinking into it like a shadow into darkness.

Certainly, she could just get up and find him now. It’s not too hard to figure out where he might be. There are two separate venues at tonight’s wedding reception, owing to the sheer fuckload of people in attendance today. The first is the indoor function hall, with the big stage and the fancy lights and the nice, pretty centrepieces. The second is the beach, with the free-flowing booze and the shattering bass and the throngs of young people frolicking in the sand.

Ben and the rest of the wedding party are seated in the former; Rey and her friends are relegated to the latter.

Finn had likened it to being on the Skywalkers’ version of the kids' table.

So it’s most likely that Ben is tucked away on the wedding party table, hiding behind his parents and no doubt sulking. But her pride knows better than to let her pursue him. Clearly, he’s been actively avoiding her like the plague. Clearly, he never wants to see her again. Which is just fine by Rey. 

Even if she doesn’t understand it and never will. Even if she’ll never get an ounce of closure from it. Even if it’ll probably haunt her for the rest of her life.

No, really, it’s fine.

“Aren’t you gonna congratulate me?”

Rey’s in the middle of a sip when that startles her. She cuts it short with a small puff of her cheeks, and then quaffs it down in a much less graceful way than she would have otherwise.

Han Solo smiles down at her. He’s got an empty whiskey glass dangling from one hand and an unfastened bow tie around his neck. He stands over her with a tooth-showing grin and shoulders so relaxed that, for once, he looks like he’s comfortable in his own skin.

For once, he looks really fucking happy.

She’s so used to seeing him wound up tighter than a jack-in-the-box one tweak away from bursting open that he almost looks like a completely different person now. When he’s not fumbling for words at a high-stakes client meeting, or loudly quarreling with Chewie in Russian over the phone, or rubbing his temples over yet another domestic with his son, he’s grumbling to Rey over a mug of pure black coffee and cautioning her on ever having kids or running her own business.

Today, he’s just happy.

 _Good for him_. She returns his smile with negligible effort. “Congratulations. Sorry. It’s a bit hard to find you amongst the _gazillions_ of people here.”

He flicks his eyes up to the sky as he pulls out the chair beside her. “I know. Leia loves the pageantry.” He flops down into it, bringing his glass to his lips, remembering it’s empty, and then tossing it onto the table. “I don’t mind it, though. Whatever makes her happy.”

Leia’s lucky to have a guy like Han. It’s unfortunate that they had to spend so long apart, only to realise that time was misspent years later. It really makes you think about not letting go of a good thing.

Not Rey, though. She’d rather not think about that.

“So, how you doin’, kiddo?” Han asks. Usually, when he asks that question, it’s more of a rhetorical greeting, mumbled in passing as he races into the office. Tonight, however, it seems genuine.

“I’m fine,” she says cagily. “The wedding was beautiful. I cried like a baby. And the reception has been really fun. I’m just a bit tired.” His penetrating gaze unnerves her, so she drops her eyes to her hands, avoiding it. “You know I’m not really a party person.”

“Mmm,” he hums, and it sounds skeptical. “Have you been inside? It’s a lot more mellow in there.”

She meets his eyes, and there’s a glint of something in them. Something suggestive and knowing.

Parents always know a lot more than they let on. Not that Rey considers Han a parent. But when it comes to unintended father figures, he’s probably her best bet.

“I get a bit claustrophobic around big crowds,” she says, and that’s not a total lie. “At least out here I have open air.”

Han nods, pursing his lips in defeat. “Alright. Well, at least allow me one dance, then.”

She smiles down at his outstretched hand. “I have to go pack soon. My flight’s in two hours.”

“And the airport is, what, five seconds away?” He rises from his seat and waggles his fingers at her. “Come on. It’s my wedding.”

She yields with a laugh and a sigh. “Fine.”

It’s weird seeing Han dance. He’s never really been the dancing type. But he does lead Rey into a gentle sway, clearly having attended some dance classes for the wedding despite his stiff posture and inexperienced footwork.

He’s a sweet man.

“So,” he says, and the way that he hesitates lets her know it’s about to get uncomfortable. “When are you thinkin’ of settlin’ down, Rey?”

She tenses. Obviously he has some sort of an agenda to this. _Settling down_ is not a topic of conversation that someone by the likes of Han has a predilection to.

“I don’t know,” she says, consciously relaxing her grip on his shoulder. “Maybe I need to find a boyfriend first.”

“Right,” he coughs, an unnaturally quick response. “A boyfriend. You do need that first.”

Rey’s way past the point of being suspicious now. It’s apparent to her that Han is going somewhere very specific with this, even if the way he’s doing it is painfully ham-fisted.

“What, uh…?” He falters, as if it pains him to verbalise his next thought. The cynical part of her wonders if Leia put him up to this. “What kind of boyfriend are you looking for? Short, tall… Skinny, fat… Blonde, brunette…” He pauses there to clear his throat. “Gentle, uh… Assertive…”

Rey has to laugh. The man is so adorably awkward, and so lousy at being subtle. Maybe she should throw him a bone.

Or maybe she should just mess with him instead. “Someone tall,” she says.

His right eyebrow arches in intrigue. “Oh?”

“Yeah. And funny. And hot-headed. And has nice, thick, dark hair.”

She’s not so subtle herself. He relaxes his features into an easy, relenting smirk, as if to say, “Alright, you got me.”

“Someone like you!” Rey exclaims, bulging her eyes in mock epiphany.

“Okay, okay,” he chuckles, dropping the act along with his shoulders. “I was just curious, you know.”

“I know.” A hesitant pause, and then, “I’ll tell you all about it one day.”

A dimpled quirk lifts the corner of his mouth, skewing his lips into a crooked smile.

That same crooked smile.

“We would be so lucky,” he replies, conserving their little tactic of ambiguous phrasing.

Her heart swells at that. She could hug him, fling her arms around him and then burst into tears. But she won’t. The two of them have never been particularly touchy with each other, and it’d be weird to start now - especially with things getting…complicated. Even dancing with him now feels a bit odd, her fingers clasped in his and his hand hovering over her back. Their preferred form of affection is more in the little things, like Rey arriving at her desk in the morning to find a cup of her favourite tea already sitting by her mouse.

“Thanks, Han,” is all she says, and between them, that’s enough.

A hand folds over her shoulder, bringing their heartfelt moment to a close. “Rey. Time to go.”

She spins. Her vision skips around a bit before settling on Finn. Behind him, the rest of her friends loiter by, taking turns hugging Leia in a hasty farewell. Leia’s got Poe in her arms when she spots Rey over his shoulder, and waves her over with a polished hand.

Rey turns back to look at Han. He nods at her in approval. “Go on,” he says.

“Come say bye to everyone,” she tells him, almost in reproach.

“Ha,” he snickers. “Right.”

Leia smells like champagne and roses when she gathers Rey into her arms. Rey shuts her eyes, memorising the scent, feeling poignant about it and not really knowing why.

“Don’t be a stranger, Rey,” Leia says, and like Han, her words carry more weight than they let on. Unlike Han, however, they’re articulated with much more finesse.

Finn stops her before they head off. He jerks his head toward the function hall. “You don’t wanna say bye to…?” He can’t physically vocalise the name, but Rey knows who he’s talking about. And she appreciates the monumental effort it must have taken him to mention it without throwing up.

She gives him a tiny shake of the head. “No. It’s over.”

It feels like she’s saying it more to herself than to him.

The bride and groom insist on walking them back to the hotel, which Rey can’t imagine they’re planning to do with every guest. What’s more is that they stick to Rey’s sides like glue, Leia linking arms with her on the left and Han sauntering alongside her on the right. They make innocuous conversation as they stroll down the beach, flinging harmless questions her way such as what time her flight is, if she’s got an aisle or a window seat, who’s picking her up from the airport, if she’s planning to check in her luggage.

Rey is tempted to cut to the chase and stop them right in their tracks, extinguishing whatever delusions of grandeur they might have that could bolster her own foolish hope. _Nothing is going to happen between me and Ben,_ she wants to say. _So you can forget about me joining your Christmas dinners, or being your future daughter-in-law, or birthing your future grandbabies. Because that will never, ever, ever-_

“Rey!”

She stops. That foolish hope bursts into wildfire.

It’s him. Ben Solo. Barreling up to her across the sand. She has to do a double-take to make sure she’s not hallucinating, conscious that her addled mind has a sick history of imagining things. It’s staggering how many times her five-year-old self had mistakenly spotted her parents in busy Jakku markets.

But then Leia calls out his name, and her friends all pause behind her. It’s apparent that they also see him there, racing up to them with his tux jacket slung over his shoulder and a decidedly crazed look in his eye.

Rey didn’t imagine it. He’s here. Ben is actually here.

_My God, he looks mental._

She exhales his name, barely audible past her own ragged wheeze. “Ben. What are you-?”

“You can’t go,” he states, like it’s an incontrovertible fact. “You can’t leave. Y-You just… You can’t.”

Rey is shaking. Did he really just say that to her? Did he really just tell her that...

That he wants her to stay?

Poe hobbles over to Ben’s side on one trembling foot. “Dude, what are you doing?”

Ben ignores him. “I can’t… I’d be stupid to… I can’t just let you leave like this. Without saying anything. I don’t know why I…”

There’s a croaky _oh my God_ that gets caught in Rey’s throat. She’s too shell-shocked to do anything but gape.

“What the hell is going on?” Paige demands from somewhere behind Finn and Rose.

Holy shit. It’s impossible to have a conversation like this when he’s chosen to confront her in front of _every single one of her friends_. If she could talk, she’d be asking him what the hell he was thinking.

Thankfully, his mother is there to do it for her. “Ben.” Leia’s countenance is tense, like she’s hardly able to contain her embarrassment. “This is neither the time nor the place.”

“Then when?” he retorts, stubborn to the end. “What am I gonna do, just let her fly back to Hosnian? Where I have no means of contacting her? Where I may never see her again? Where it could all end, just like that?”

_Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God._

Has he really thought about all this? Has he looked at it that far ahead? Has he actually been as scared about it as he sounds?

“Ben.” Leia sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Rey literally works for your father.”

Ben gives her a flat, unappeased stare.

“You could just find her on Facebook,” Han adds. “Even I know how to do that.”

Poe barges back into the conversation and flicks a mad finger between Ben and Rey. “Is there something going on between you two? Are you, like-?”

Ben snubs him. “Stay one more night,” he says, advancing on Rey. “I’ll reimburse you for the ticket. You can take the jet with me and my family tomorrow morning.”

_Oh. My. God._

“What the _fuck_ is happening?” Poe exclaims.

“Ben, I…” There are a million words in Rey’s mouth, and she can’t decide on which ones to choke out. Eventually, she settles on, “I didn’t book any accommodation for tonight.”

A flimsy excuse, but Ben lobs it right back at her like a live grenade. “You can stay in my room.”

_OH MY GOD._

She can’t speak. She can’t breathe. She’s numb to all rational thought right now. It’s like her brain has completely frozen over, leaving behind an icy slab of shock.

“There _is_ something going on!” Poe hollers. “What the _hell?_ ”

“Dameron, shut up!” Ben roars, finally acknowledging him. He looks at him like he’s one more interjection away from getting punched in the teeth.

“When the fuck did this happen?” Poe roars back, unfazed.

Idly, Rey realises she was wrong to think that Poe would’ve found this amusing. Apparently, he doesn’t. Apparently, he’s horrified.

Leia manoeuvres her way in with expert diplomacy. “This is a conversation that is better off held in the privacy of those directly involved.”

 _That’s right_ , Rey wants to say. This whole ordeal is far too public. She can hear Jannah, all the way from here, telling her boyfriend to shut up on the phone before whispering, “What’s the drama?” to Paige.

Ben, on the other hand, couldn’t be more impervious to it. He proceeds to ignore every other soul in the immediate vicinity like they’re not all standing _right_ there, entirely privy to every word that comes out of his mouth. “Rey, I’m sorry,” he says, close enough now that she can smell the hard alcohol on him. “I didn’t respect your boundaries. I get that now. And I won’t do it again. I won’t tell anyone we slept together unless you’re okay with it.”

And just like that, the ice boils over into bubbling fury.

_Holy. Mother. Of. Christ._

When Rey manages to wade through the hot, steaming, _debilitating_ fumes of rage to finally find the lucidity to speak, her words come out in a sharp, mangled screech. “O-Oh! You mean, like you _just_ did?”

Ben blinks at her once, and then twice, and then the furrow in his brow unfurls in comprehension. Slowly, like a child peeking out at something scary through his fingers, he turns to his left, where Rey’s full line-up of friends are dispersed along the beach.

It’s as if he sees them for the first time.

Han and Leia are hiding their faces in their hands, probably reflecting on whatever they had envisioned for Ben and Rey’s relationship and how it surely wasn’t this. Finn looks like a hound on the verge of vicious attack, inching forward on one foot as Rose desperately holds him back. Jannah’s phone is long forgotten now as she simply stands and gawks, a hint of amusement in her slightly upturned lips. Paige has never looked more abhorred by anything, a wide-eyed grimace distorting her dainty features. Zorii is supporting a borderline traumatised Poe on one side, forgoing her trademark impassive stare for a mildly intrigued raise of the eyebrow.

Yup. It’s all out in the open now.

Rey can only sigh.

When Ben turns back to face her, there’s an unequivocal _oh shit_ in his eyes.

Finn slips past the barrier of Rose’s feeble arms and shoves his way in by Rey’s side. “Alright, that’s enough,” he intervenes, like he’s been dying to say that since Ben showed up. “You’ve done enough damage for the day, alright? Why don’t you just leave her alone?”

_No, Finn, what are you doing?_

Rey knows it’s about to get ugly when Ben’s eyes immediately darken like that. She’s never seen so much hate, malice, and vitriol burning through a single glare.

“This doesn’t concern you,” Ben growls - voice low, intent menacing.

She attempts to subdue him with a hand to the chest. “Ben-”

“It’s over,” Finn says, fixing his attention on the other man. He closes the distance between them by one simmering step. “You’re just embarrassing yourself.”

Ben reciprocates with his own step forward. “You have an irritating habit of sticking your nose into shit that is none of your business.”

“Boys,” Leia scolds, but is brutally ignored.

“Oh yeah?” Finn challenges. Another step closer. “Well, Rey’s my best friend. My best friend’s happiness is my business. And you, my man, are a happiness _black hole_.”

“Am I?” Ben chuckles, dark and mirthless. “Well, why don’t you go crying about it to HR like you did last time? See how far that gets you?”

_Oh. Shit._

Rey watches Finn’s face switch over into mania. She can discern in the way his forehead smooths over, his eyes go dead, and a long, sarcastic laugh billows out of his tightened lips that Ben has crossed the point of no return.

He nudges Rey out of the way, and she lets him, too stunned to resist. Leisurely, he ambles forward until the two men are all but nose-to-nose. “Oh, you have some _nerve_ bringing that up, Ben Solo.” He jabs a finger into Ben’s chest on _nerve_. “Or should I say, ‘Kylo Ren’?”

_Oh, Finn. Big mistake._

It’s not until Ben’s eyes dart to the side that Rey suddenly realises where they are. Behind her is a steep incline that sweeps down onto the shore - the shore that Rey had failed to recognise in the darkness of night.

The shore that she had tackled Ben down only yesterday afternoon.

_Oh no._

When you can anticipate something before it happens, it all transpires in slow motion. It’s like your body has to catch up to your mind before it can react. By the time Rey whips out a hand and shouts out a strangled “No!”, Ben and Finn are already halfway down the hill.

To the untrained eye, it must have happened very fast. One moment, it seemed like Ben was about to back down, falling back a step and swiping a hand over his chin; the next, he had his arms around Finn’s waist, launching them both through the air.

Leia’s shriek is the least dignified sound that Rey has ever heard come out of the woman’s mouth. “ _Ben!_ ”

Rey is quick to act once her brain stutters back into clarity. She kicks off her heels and bolts down the hill, barely keeping upright as her feet lurch in unbalanced frenzy.

The two idiots are taking much longer to tumble their way down, too busy grappling with each other for any semblance of a smooth ride. From a third-party perspective, Rey realises how ridiculous it looks, brawling with someone as you roll down a hill. Nobody over the age of ten should be engaging in such tomfoolery.

She should’ve never done it. She should’ve never acted so childish. And she should’ve never given him the idea.

Just as Rey and Ben had done yesterday, Ben and Finn topple apart as the slope flattens out. Ben shakes it off sooner, quickly clambering to his feet, and like a lion stalking his prey, steadily advances on Finn, who’s still floundering in the sand.

Rey skids down the remaining length of the hill and wrenches Ben back by the arm. She cries out his name, but he only wrests himself back, hell-bent on whatever horrid punishment he’s determined to unleash on Finn. Even slightly hunched over in predatory pursuit, he looks so wide, and hulking, and massive in the dark. On sheer size alone, Finn doesn’t stand a chance.

_My God. He’s going to kill him._

Rey tries again. This time, when she reaches for him, it’s to rest both hands on either side of his face. “Ben.”

At the touch of her skin, he falters.

“Ben, please,” she whimpers, stroking her thumbs down the contours of his cheekbones. “Stop.”

He shakes his head, advances, and then falters again. The hot waves of anger begin to dwindle from his eyes, until there’s nothing left in them but Rey’s pleading reflection.

“It’s not worth it,” she murmurs, trailing a finger down his jawline.

Slowly, he brings his hands up and closes them over hers. Together, they drop, interwoven by their sides.

Rey thinks he’s about to give her another smile. But the sound of Finn’s war cry promptly snatches it away.

Finn’s fist goes flying into Ben’s face before either of them get the chance to process it. Ben’s hand is violently ripped from Rey’s as he staggers backward from the impact, landing directly in none other than his Uncle Chewie’s arms.

The Russian behemoth is, once again, back at the perfect time to avert disaster.

“ _Finn!_ ” Rey bellows, giving Finn an irate shove in the chest. “ _He stopped!_ ”

“What?” Finn wheezes, casting his gaze on his opponent.

Ben is thrashing with every ounce of his will against Chewie’s unyielding arms, the uninhibited murder well and truly back on his face. His cheek is already swollen from the unceremonious strike, and his eyes are wild and livid behind bedraggled tufts of hair.

He looks absolutely feral.

“You little shit! I’m gonna fucking kill you!” he rages.

“Wha-?” Finn says again, turning to Rey for explanation. When all she gives him is a monstrous glare, he stammers out a flustered, “Well, I didn’t know! I… I didn’t know!” He slaps a hand over his glistening forehead, stumbling. “I-I’m sorry!”

His bemusion is genuine. While Rey and Ben were having their little moment, Finn must have still been flailing about, psyching himself up for a good old-fashioned rumble.

It’s an honest mistake. But Rey still shoves him again anyway.

Han skitters down the hill, looking like he’s about to trip over on four separate occasions. He detains his son with an arm across the chest, shouting, “That’s enough! That’s enough!” as Ben kicks and writhes against him.

Rose is the next to join them, inelegantly sliding her way down on her butt. She dusts a cursory hand over the sand on her dress before sprinting to Finn with comical urgency. “Are you alright?” she asks him, her hands whizzing between his shoulders, his hair, his face.

“Yeah, he’s fine,” Rey drones, spitting out some residual grains of sand from her mouth. “Just sandy.”

Han’s voice is a soothing chant in the background as he attempts to placate his son. “Settle down. Settle down, now.”

It’s a while before Ben shows any sign of composure. Eventually, his breathing slows, and his threshes of fury weaken. As his body begins to slacken, Han and Chewie relinquish their hold, tentatively setting his feet back into the sand.

“Alright,” Ben huffs, straightening his own collar. “Alright. I’m alright.”

When Han and Chewie start to back away, Rey knows it’s a mistake.

“ _I’M GONNA KILL THAT MOTHERFUCKER!”_

Ben lunges forward, almost startling Finn onto his ass. He’s back in Han and Chewie’s grasps within the next two seconds.

“Let me go!” he screams, his legs back in the air. “I’ll kill him! I’ll _kill_ him!”

“Ugh,” Rey groans, dropping her face into one hand. When she summons the will to look up again, she sees Leia, Poe, and the others, all watching this unfold from the top of the hill. Not one of them has their mouth closed.

What they must think of her now.

“Okay, that’s it,” Han grunts, wrangling his son into place. “We’re taking you inside. Come on, Chewie.”

“I’ll find you,” Ben hisses, baring his teeth at Finn like a rabid dog. “You’re gonna _fucking_ get it.”

Finn looks horrified. Rose even more so.

“My God, dude, calm down!” Poe calls from above.

“Shut up, Dameron!” Ben shouts back. “You still owe me eight hundred dollars!”

“Enough!” Han thunders.

Rey stands back and watches this all happen in apathetic defeat. She wonders how her life has somehow circled back to the same point.

Fighting. Buffoonery. Sand.

“God,” she says aloud, hawking and spitting more granules into the ground. “What a night.”

* * *

Ben nurses his swollen cheek with a towel wrapped around ice. Every press against his skin elicits a hiss and a wince, a throbbing reminder of his own self-destructive idiocy.

He sure made some shitty choices tonight.

After his father and Chewie had manhandled him back up the hill, they locked him in one of the dressing rooms and left him to the mercy of his mother. He had to sit there for twenty minutes, pouting down at his hands, as she lambasted his ear off with ruthless condemnations of his foolishness, his recklessness, his selfishness. It was like a scene playing out directly from his nightmares.

The only consolation he could cling onto was that it looked like Rey was about to give Finn an equally brutal talking-to before Ben was lugged away by the armpits. And Ben knows, firsthand, just how nasty Rey can be. He may have gone through twenty minutes of hell, but at least that little shitbag suffered, too.

Now he sits, alone in the sand, vacantly staring out at the inky waves. The only reason he’s allowed back on the beach is because _Finn_ and the rest of his posse have long skedaddled. His mother had also told him to “clear his head” and “reflect on his vices” while he’s out here, hoping that the fresh ocean air would return him to his senses.

For once, he listens to her.

Ben hasn’t lost his temper like that in a long while - and in front of his parents, no less. He really should have thought twice about it, because now they’ll never live it down. He can hear his mother already, recounting her pitiful version of the story to his Uncle Luke. “Ben’s anger management has...relapsed,” she’d say, with that pinched, pitying expression that makes him want to puke.

Anger management wasn’t the issue. The turning point for him was that fourth glass of whiskey. He really shouldn’t have chugged it down. He should have stopped at the second, or taken his time with the third. But he’d been so nervous, gearing himself up to talk to Rey. The first glass just wasn’t enough.

He really does take after his mother.

As he’s ruminating on that scary thought, a shadow floats down to his peripheral vision. He rolls his eyes, dreading the impending dialogue with whichever nosy dullard has decided to join him on the shore this evening.

When he looks over, his heart almost bursts out of his chest.

The nosy dullard is Rey. She sits beside him in the sand, silent, pensive, dimly illuminated by the glow of the crescent moon. Her arms tightly cradle her knees to her ribs, and she peers up at the navy sky with cool-headed indifference.

She’s radiant.

He whips his head back to the front, struggling to match her level of calmness. The English language is suddenly lost to him. Every word he’s ever learnt fizzles out before it hits his tongue.

“How’s your face?” she asks, just as he inhales to utter his first syllable.

He snaps his jaw shut with a light clink. “Hurts,” he answers, his voice low and even. “It’s just my cheek.” As if in demonstration, he flattens the towel against his cheekbone and releases a soft _ah_ at the sting.

“You’re lucky.”

He scowls at her incredulously, his face aching with the motion like an illustrative contradiction.

“He didn’t punch you that hard,” she says. She’s still not looking at him, but there’s a vague smile on her profile. “If he did, you’d be in hospital right now.”

A hiss of amusement rattles out of him. “Yeah, I know. Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time I’ve gotten socked.”

That triggers a tuneful laugh from her, which makes him kind of pleased. He feels like an eager schoolboy, proud that he’s made his crush giggle in class.

“I’m sorry about that,” she tells him, and she does sound apologetic.

“It’s not your fault. It was his.” He’s unable to stifle the disdain in his voice. “Fucking coward. Getting me when I was off-guard like that.”

“Finn didn’t know.”

“Yeah, bullshit.”

His contemptuous bark precedes a tense silence. In it, he realises how stubborn, and bitter, and childish he sounds.

Maybe he does have a bit of a trust problem.

“Finn won’t get in the way again,” Rey says. “I’ve made sure of it.”

There’s an edge of hardness in the way she says it, a hint of wrath simmering just below the surface. It brings him a sense of petty satisfaction to imagine Finn being on the tail end of that wrath.

“You get a talking-to from your mother?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he groans. “Felt like I was seventeen again.”

“What happened when you were seventeen?”

Oh boy. Time to dredge this up after years. “I stole my dad’s car and drove it into a tree.”

Rey must be surprised, because he feels her shift beside him. “You crashed the Millennium Falcon?”

He cringes at the memory. Han was so mad at him that they didn’t talk for weeks. Ben had to pick up extra shifts at the movie theatre just to shoulder half the cost of repairs.

“Yeah. But don’t call it that.”

“Why?”

“It’s ridiculous to name a car.” When she doesn’t say anything, he adds, “I crashed it on purpose. I always felt like he loved that car more than me.”

His words hang heavy in the salty air. He’s never put the sentiment into words, and it feels so much sadder, actualised like this. What kind of loser gets jealous of a car?

“Ben,” Rey says. As always, his name sounds exquisite wrapped in her voice. “Your father loves you. You have no idea. He talks about you all the time. I feel like I actually know you from his stories alone.”

Ben likes the sound of that - the idea that before all this even happened, he was a sizeable part of her life in some way. “He talks about you all the time, too,” he says. “I feel like I know you as well.”

“You do know me.”

He can’t keep his gaze forward. He has to look at her at that. He has to perceive how she’s feeling when she says it - if her mouth is tight or upturned, if her shoulders are tense or relaxed, if her eyes are gloomy or blissful.

But she gives him nothing - still impassive, still staring straight ahead - keeping her cards ever close to her chest.

The ice in his hands has melted, leaving only a soggy towel in his vice-like grip. He wrings it out into the sand in front of him, using it as an excuse to keep his eyes off her. “Don’t you have a flight to catch?”

She draws in a quiet but sharp breath through her teeth. “Nah.”

He looks up at her. Just like that, the pain in his cheek vanishes.

“I think I’ll stay here another night,” she says, and it sounds nonchalant, like it’s not the most amazing news in the world. She finally turns to face him, a small smile blooming on her lips, her eyes positively gleaming in the moonlight.

Her smile, faint as it is, lights up the entire beach. Since their first night here, she’s been a golden beam of light, shimmering through the gloomy tunnel of his life.

Fucking hell. She’s turned him into a poet.

“Wh-?” It takes him three attempts to find his words. “What, I didn’t royally fuck this up?”

“You did.”

“Oh.”

“But…” Her smile widens, and she loops her fingers through his, almost sending him into cardiac arrest. “You fought for me.”

Before Scarif, Ben could scarcely remember what it felt like to be happy. He thought it was the warmth of his mother’s arms around him, holding him close by a toasty fireplace. He thought it was the thrill of sticking his head out the Falcon’s sunroof, whooping into the wind as his father drove and his Uncle Lando steadied him. He thought it was the gratification of clutching that Ahch-To acceptance letter, and the pride in his Uncle Luke’s eyes as they embraced in celebration.

But now, he knows for sure. Now, he knows he felt it. It was the squeal of excitement Rey gave him when he found her at the crowded bar. It was the gasp of exuberance she drew when he kissed her into a wall. It was the softness of her palm as she caressed it down his face, and the muffle of her voice as she giggled at him through rumpled bedsheets.

It’s the dimple on her cheek as she beams at him through the dark. It’s the timidity in her movement as she hovers her free hand over his cheek. It’s the smitten sparkle in her eyes as she presses her lips to his.

The waves roar with ardour.

The kiss is unlike any they’ve shared before - their lips firm but gentle, their breaths deep but slow. Her thumb gently traces the tender bruise on his cheek, and her fingers sink into the tousled fringe of his hair. She moves her mouth against his so lithely that he forgets what it was like to kiss anyone else.

He drinks her in like his survival depends on it. There’s just never enough when it comes to her. He can’t get close enough. He can’t kiss her hard enough. He can’t wrap his arm around her fast enough, or hug her to him tight enough.

He’s so swept up in her lips, her taste, her smell - all of her - that a meteor could hit the beach at this very moment and he wouldn’t even-

_BANG._

Perhaps he spoke too soon.

An ear-splitting boom thunders up above, startling their lips apart.

While Rey reacts with a breathy chuckle of delight, Ben falls back on his elbows, aghast. Dazzling flashes of red, green, and yellow litter the sky, and he jerks in dismay at every resounding blast.

_God-fucking-dammit. She let him do the fireworks._

As he cowers in fright like a pathetic little bunny rabbit, he can sense Rey appraising the side of his face. Her keen eye detects every panicked wince, every uneasy flinch, every spineless twitch of his trembling body.

Dear God, he hopes she’s still attracted to him.

“Are you-?” A quiver of amusement colours her voice. “Are you scared of fireworks?”

“No, I’m not scared.” Even he finds that unconvincing, the way his inflection soars with defensiveness. “I’m just…wary. My idiot dad blasted me in the back with a rocket on my twenty-first birthday.”

He hears but doesn’t see her laugh, his eyes anchored to the vivid explosions in the sky. She rests her fingertips along the line of his jaw and brings him around to face her. “You don’t have to be afraid of fireworks, Ben,” she murmurs, brushing back the hair above his right ear. The gesture is weirdly maternal, but it satisfies a very deprived part of him that has been craving it for a long time. “Just because fireworks burned you once, doesn’t mean they will again. Doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy them. Look.”

Now that it’s there, it’s hard for him to tear his gaze from her beguiling face. But she’s trying to point something out to him, so he follows the trace of her finger. It leads him to the sky, where an amalgam of scintillating colours dance and spiral like the dynamic swirl of a Van Gogh painting. He sucks in a breath - a short, shuddering gasp - and relinquishes the sculpted balls of sand in his fists.

Somehow, with Rey’s pointer finger to accompany them, the fireworks manage to look beautiful.

She winds a hand around the crook in his elbow, and nestles her head into the curve of his neck. Her body fits against him so cosily, like the perfect match to his worn-out puzzle piece. “I can tell you’re not really the relationship type.”

“I can be,” he counters, way too promptly for it to not sound needy.

She adjusts herself a little, pillowy cheek shifting against hard shoulder. “I don’t see any harm in…” She pauses, swallows. “…giving it a go.”

It’s back. The heartbeat in his ears. It pounds erratically like the sputtering fireworks.

“I mean…” The waver in her voice is barely detectable over the squeal of the fireworks and the mad thumping in his veins, but it appeases him - reminds him that they’re both leaping into this nervous as fuck. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

Ben can think of a few things. A few life-ruining disasters of cataclysmic proportions.

 _But it’s worth the pain_ , his mother’s voice coaxes him, and he rues the idea that she might be right.

“I think there’s a good chance that you’ll be tackling me to the ground within the next twenty-four hours,” he says.

“Gee, you sure know how to inspire confidence.”

He laughs - a sound he didn’t think he’d be making when he woke up this morning. “But, you know, I don’t mind,” he says. “I like a feral gremlin.”

She barks out a scoff. “Wow. You really _are_ smooth with the ladies.”

“Nah, just you.” He presses his lips to her hair, and it feels like the most natural thing he’s ever done. Like he’s been doing it for years.

He feels like he’s known her for years.

“So, we really doing this?” he asks, on the cusp of a titter. He doesn’t want to say the words _Do you want to be my girlfriend?_ because that just sounds corny as fuck, so he leaves it at that. But it’s essentially what he means.

Rey hums in thought. For the longest time, she says nothing, and he begins to wonder if she’ll ever give him an answer. If she’ll ever speak again at all. But then she sniffs, shrugging her shoulders, and simply says, “Fuck it.”

He stills, not sure if he heard her right. “Fuck…it,” he mouths - slowly, deliberately, testing out the words on his tongue.

Somehow, it’s the perfect answer. After everything they’ve been through, no two words could more perfectly encapsulate the kaleidoscopic whirlwind that is _them_ , and the terrifying journey that they’re about to embark on. 

He smiles, and he can feel her smiling, too.

Yeah. Fuck it.


End file.
